<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://wandering.shop/@cstross" class="u-url mention">@<span>cstross</span></a></span> As an ex-COBOL programmer who was knee-deep in the Y2K mess, one of the issues is that many of those old COBOL programs were compiled, but the source code was lost.</p><p>In some cases, corporations were worried COBOL vendors would disappear, so they created incompatible, in-house COBOL compilers, making the mess even worse!</p><p>Naturally, there were no tests to verify that the software functioned correctly ...</p>