There aren’t a lot of businesses built around tape cassettes or floppy disks, so a lack of experts who can repair those decades-old technologies is rarely a problem. That’s not the case with Cobol—a 64-year-old programming language that Wall Street and the federal government rely on to process tens of trillions of dollars worth of transactions annually. As Cobol gets older, those massive organizations have been hard-pressed to find people who can update their ancient systems.
When something does go wrong, many firms turn to 82-year-old Bill Hinshaw, the “Cobol Cowboy.” Hinshaw works out of his home office in northern Texas, where he oversees a remote team of some 600 aging Cobol engineers—some of whom cut their teeth as programmers in the ’60s and ’70s. Every week, the cowboys respond to emergency calls—including one in 2021 from Superior Welding Supply, a 93-year-old Iowa firm whose only in-house Cobol expert died just before the company’s software crashed.
