On Mon, 6 Apr 2020 14:00:45 +1200, I wrote:
The Governor of the US state of New Jersey is appealing for help in maintaining their elderly COBOL-based mainframe systems ...
Seems the need is wider than just one US state: IBM itself is now running an effort to try to find COBOL programmers to maintain all these old systems <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/ibm-scrambles-to-find-or-train-more-cobol-programmers-to-help-states/>. The irony of IBM now being the “face of COBOL”, if you like, is that the language was created by an industry consortium without the cooperation of IBM <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CODASYL>. Instead, the world’s biggest computer company (at the time) was trying to promote its own all-singing, all-dancing PL/I programming language. So COBOL really became dominant in business use in spite of IBM’s efforts, not because of them.