Al Breland, PMP

began writing COBOL code in 1967 in Junior College, After four years in the Marines and getting married. I was looking for a direction for my life other than working nights in a Detroit auto factory. My first programming job was with Chevrolet Central Office division of General Motors. At that time IT was in it's infancy and we had to learn to write code in 50K segments because our IBM 360/50 only had 256k. That machine ran all of the computing for the Chevrolet Division of General Motors. I was assigned to the warranty division and handled recall campaigns for cars with problems. That meant I had to write code to search all historical sales data for every Chevrolet sold for a particular year, make and model. This information was from a data cell (databases hadn't been invented yet) and was used to address envelopes to owners of these automobiles. After a couple of years I moved to a bank for more money and a chance to work on IBM 370 equipment. This was a PL1 shop that had a COBOL payroll application which I maintained. The payroll was a service to companies like Ford Motor Car. I saw checks for millions of dollars bveing usede to play "float" back in those days. In the early days you promoted yourself and your income by changing jobs on a regular basis. The demand was high and talent was in short supply. An excellent situation to be in. In the early 1980's I had the opportunity to learn the HP3000 system which was my first database and mini experience. I went on to work at Westinghouse, numerous banks, Alltel, Syetematics (banking facilities management firm), StateFarm Insurance, and World Vision. I did a lot of freelance COBOL work during that period. My last big assignment was helping Alltel through the Y2k fiasco (why not I helped create the problem :) Along with everyone who worked on that assignment I was layed off and basically forced into retirement in 2003. I was not ready for retirement and still feel like I have something to offer especially in the LEGACY COBOL arena. My health requires that I work from home so this site interest me a great deal. After all 36 years of experience is a terrible thing to waste. Al