Re: [Q]: How many lines of Cobol running worldwide???

From: Arnold Trembley (arnold.trembley_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 01/07/04 

Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2004 06:20:44 GMT

LX-i wrote:
> Francis ANDRE wrote:
> (snip)
>> In my understanding from the various sources, it is counting in
>> billions of
>> lines....which is quite large in term of evaluation....Does anybody could
>> give me more precise numbers, specially on past, present and future
>> estimations??
>
>
> Billions sounds right to me. Our one little Air Force aircraft
> maintenance system has about 1.2M, and the supply system we interface
> with has close to 5M.
>
>

In 1996, as part of a Y2K project, we counted up how many COBOL
programs and lines of code we had in production in order to estimate
the scope of our Y2K work. It worked to something like 4,500
production programs and about 7 million lines of code. This was a
shop with maybe 100 to 150 actual programmers. Of course, the number
is a moving target as new programs are written, existing programs are
enhanced (usually resulting in a slight increase in LOC), and even
occasionally deleting an old program.

I can easily believe the number would be in the billions just for the
USA, but there's no way to actually count it. We missed some programs
that weren't stored in the proper libraries. 

-- 
http://arnold.trembley.home.att.net/