#cobol — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #cobol, aggregated by home.social.
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gcobol-17 performane work: "ADD 1 TO A." challenge. Why? Many possible data formats for A (encoding, sign, decimal positions, alphameric formatted, ...).
FREE Support Services for First Customer! Low rates for first Professional Services (consulting) engagement! Just sayin'
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Using COBOL As A Shader Language
Yep, what's in the title apparently can be done.COBOL stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, and is an extremely verbose language designed purposely to be understandable to managers. Everything in COBOL reads like it does, which makes it hard to work with. A fair portion of the financial world still runs on COBOL, in some ca
https://setsideb.com/using-cobol-as-a-shader-language/
#niche #cobol #niche #ShaderLanguage #StupidComputerTricks #Vulkan -
Using COBOL As A Shader Language
Yep, what's in the title apparently can be done.COBOL stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, and is an extremely verbose language designed purposely to be understandable to managers. Everything in COBOL reads like it does, which makes it hard to work with. A fair portion of the financial world still runs on COBOL, in some ca
https://setsideb.com/using-cobol-as-a-shader-language/
#niche #cobol #niche #ShaderLanguage #StupidComputerTricks #Vulkan -
Using COBOL As A Shader Language
Yep, what's in the title apparently can be done.COBOL stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, and is an extremely verbose language designed purposely to be understandable to managers. Everything in COBOL reads like it does, which makes it hard to work with. A fair portion of the financial world still runs on COBOL, in some ca
https://setsideb.com/using-cobol-as-a-shader-language/
#niche #cobol #niche #ShaderLanguage #StupidComputerTricks #Vulkan -
Using COBOL As A Shader Language
Yep, what's in the title apparently can be done.COBOL stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, and is an extremely verbose language designed purposely to be understandable to managers. Everything in COBOL reads like it does, which makes it hard to work with. A fair portion of the financial world still runs on COBOL, in some ca
https://setsideb.com/using-cobol-as-a-shader-language/
#niche #cobol #niche #ShaderLanguage #StupidComputerTricks #Vulkan -
Using COBOL As A Shader Language
Yep, what's in the title apparently can be done.COBOL stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, and is an extremely verbose language designed purposely to be understandable to managers. Everything in COBOL reads like it does, which makes it hard to work with. A fair portion of the financial world still runs on COBOL, in some ca
https://setsideb.com/using-cobol-as-a-shader-language/
#niche #cobol #niche #ShaderLanguage #StupidComputerTricks #Vulkan -
🤖 AI is accelerating mainframe modernization in 2026.
Enterprises are using AI-powered tools to modernize COBOL applications, automate workflows, improve z/OS monitoring, and enable faster DevOps transformation.
✔ AI-Driven Automation
✔ COBOL Modernization
✔ Intelligent z/OS Monitoring
✔ Faster Enterprise Transformation👉 [www.vrnexgen1.com](http://www.vrnexgen1.com)
#AiMainframeModernization #COBOL #zOS #DevOps #Automation #VRNexGen
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Symas will be at Carolina Codes! in August. A second talk on COBOL #cobol #cobolworx and a talk on #openldap. This is a nice regional conference in lovely Greenville, SC.
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Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL
https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper
#HackerNews #AgenticInterface #Mainframes #COBOL #Technology #Innovation #HyperCubic
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Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL
https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper
#HackerNews #AgenticInterface #Mainframes #COBOL #Technology #Innovation #HyperCubic
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Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL
https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper
#HackerNews #AgenticInterface #Mainframes #COBOL #Technology #Innovation #HyperCubic
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Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL
https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper
#HackerNews #AgenticInterface #Mainframes #COBOL #Technology #Innovation #HyperCubic
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Agentic interface for mainframes and COBOL
https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper
#HackerNews #AgenticInterface #Mainframes #COBOL #Technology #Innovation #HyperCubic
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RE: https://disabled.social/@vlrny/116540812062829077
Not voting, as I was born #disabled
In the #blind community, I was #sighted, although I was born with #cataracts and have always been #LegallyBlind. My dad was blind, and navigated everywhere with his #whitecane. He ws part of an #advocacy #organiztion, and he traveled around the #US by air. His sister, my Aunt Buffy, was a #COBOL #programmer for Sears in #Chicago. She took me to her work once. We rode the #El with her #GuideDog, Ginger.
This meant that it was tough to get away with "Blind kids can't. . ." unless I'd actually *tried*..
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RE: https://disabled.social/@vlrny/116540812062829077
Not voting, as I was born #disabled
In the #blind community, I was #sighted, although I was born with #cataracts and have always been #LegallyBlind. My dad was blind, and navigated everywhere with his #whitecane. He ws part of an #advocacy #organiztion, and he traveled around the #US by air. His sister, my Aunt Buffy, was a #COBOL #programmer for Sears in #Chicago. She took me to her work once. We rode the #El with her #GuideDog, Ginger.
This meant that it was tough to get away with "Blind kids can't. . ." unless I'd actually *tried*..
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RE: https://disabled.social/@vlrny/116540812062829077
Not voting, as I was born #disabled
In the #blind community, I was #sighted, although I was born with #cataracts and have always been #LegallyBlind. My dad was blind, and navigated everywhere with his #whitecane. He ws part of an #advocacy #organiztion, and he traveled around the #US by air. His sister, my Aunt Buffy, was a #COBOL #programmer for Sears in #Chicago. She took me to her work once. We rode the #El with her #GuideDog, Ginger.
This meant that it was tough to get away with "Blind kids can't. . ." unless I'd actually *tried*..
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RE: https://disabled.social/@vlrny/116540812062829077
Not voting, as I was born #disabled
In the #blind community, I was #sighted, although I was born with #cataracts and have always been #LegallyBlind. My dad was blind, and navigated everywhere with his #whitecane. He ws part of an #advocacy #organiztion, and he traveled around the #US by air. His sister, my Aunt Buffy, was a #COBOL #programmer for Sears in #Chicago. She took me to her work once. We rode the #El with her #GuideDog, Ginger.
This meant that it was tough to get away with "Blind kids can't. . ." unless I'd actually *tried*..
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Free COBOL to Linux support. Have they asked you to convert #cobol applications to AWS or Containers? Reach out for help. #cobolworx #gnucobol #gcobol
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Free COBOL to Linux support. Have they asked you to convert #cobol applications to AWS or Containers? Reach out for help. #cobolworx #gnucobol #gcobol
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GCC has released Release Candidate 1 for GCC 16. The final release objective is for late April or May. GCC COBOL (gcobol) 16 is included in the release with many fixes and improvements. #cobol #gcobol #gcc #cobolworx
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GCC has released Release Candidate 1 for GCC 16. The final release objective is for late April or May. GCC COBOL (gcobol) 16 is included in the release with many fixes and improvements. #cobol #gcobol #gcc #cobolworx
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Looks like COBOL programmers will be in demand again :)
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Allein #SVG und #MathML sind relevante Browser-basierte #XML-Technologien. #RSS / #Atom existieren ebenfalls.
#XSLT lebt auf dem Server weiter und hat in Version 3.0 (bald 4.0) primär für lokal angesiedelte Prozesse der Dokumentverarbeitung (#DITA, #DocBook, #TEI) eine ungebrochene Bedeutung. Zudem steht mit #SaxonJS eine Browser-Alternative zur Verfügung.
Pensionierte XMLer werden bestimmt ebenso gefragt sein wie im Fall von #COBOL.
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Allein #SVG und #MathML sind relevante Browser-basierte #XML-Technologien. #RSS / #Atom existieren ebenfalls.
#XSLT lebt auf dem Server weiter und hat in Version 3.0 (bald 4.0) primär für lokal angesiedelte Prozesse der Dokumentverarbeitung (#DITA, #DocBook, #TEI) eine ungebrochene Bedeutung. Zudem steht mit #SaxonJS eine Browser-Alternative zur Verfügung.
Pensionierte XMLer werden bestimmt ebenso gefragt sein wie im Fall von #COBOL.
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Allein #SVG und #MathML sind relevante Browser-basierte #XML-Technologien. #RSS / #Atom existieren ebenfalls.
#XSLT lebt auf dem Server weiter und hat in Version 3.0 (bald 4.0) primär für lokal angesiedelte Prozesse der Dokumentverarbeitung (#DITA, #DocBook, #TEI) eine ungebrochene Bedeutung. Zudem steht mit #SaxonJS eine Browser-Alternative zur Verfügung.
Pensionierte XMLer werden bestimmt ebenso gefragt sein wie im Fall von #COBOL.
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Allein #SVG und #MathML sind relevante Browser-basierte #XML-Technologien. #RSS / #Atom existieren ebenfalls.
#XSLT lebt auf dem Server weiter und hat in Version 3.0 (bald 4.0) primär für lokal angesiedelte Prozesse der Dokumentverarbeitung (#DITA, #DocBook, #TEI) eine ungebrochene Bedeutung. Zudem steht mit #SaxonJS eine Browser-Alternative zur Verfügung.
Pensionierte XMLer werden bestimmt ebenso gefragt sein wie im Fall von #COBOL.
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Allein #SVG und #MathML sind relevante Browser-basierte #XML-Technologien. #RSS / #Atom existieren ebenfalls.
#XSLT lebt auf dem Server weiter und hat in Version 3.0 (bald 4.0) primär für lokal angesiedelte Prozesse der Dokumentverarbeitung (#DITA, #DocBook, #TEI) eine ungebrochene Bedeutung. Zudem steht mit #SaxonJS eine Browser-Alternative zur Verfügung.
Pensionierte XMLer werden bestimmt ebenso gefragt sein wie im Fall von #COBOL.
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#COBOL content.. from 8 years ago
The language designers made it have no functions on purpose because they thought functions were hard and were for egg heads.
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Andrew Turley on The Relationship Between COBOL and Computer Science (2017)
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Mainframe-Exit für viele Großunternehmen: „physisch und finanziell unmöglich“
"Marktforscher von Gartner warnen davor, die Fähigkeiten generativer KI-Tools beim Mainframe-Ausstieg zu überschätzen."
»Bei einer automatisierten Konvertierung von Legacy-Code zeige KI hingegen erhebliche Einschränkungen.«
Die merken auch alles! 🤡 -
COBOL: 65 лет в ядре мировой экономики
Каждый раз, когда за рубежом кто-то снимает деньги в банкомате, рассчитывается картой или получает государственное пособие, с высокой вероятностью где-то в цепочке выполняется код, написанный на COBOL — языке 1959 года. Ежедневно через COBOL-системы проходит на $3 трлн коммерческих транзакций и около 95% операций в банкоматах мира обрабатывается именно этим языком. Такие системы не рассчитаны на резкие скачки, горизонтальное масштабирование и микросервисную архитектуру. При этом с каждым годом число людей, способных безопасно вносить изменения в такой код, сокращается — а значит, риск накапливается, даже если формально все «работает». Разбираемся подробнее, как написанный 65 лет назад код поддерживает современную мировую систему и скоро ли это изменится.
https://habr.com/ru/companies/onlinepatent/articles/1023236/
#cobol #cobolcraft #история_it #история_успеха #история_ит #история_создания #история_программирования #ibm #microsoft #anthropic
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COBOL: 65 лет в ядре мировой экономики
Каждый раз, когда за рубежом кто-то снимает деньги в банкомате, рассчитывается картой или получает государственное пособие, с высокой вероятностью где-то в цепочке выполняется код, написанный на COBOL — языке 1959 года. Ежедневно через COBOL-системы проходит на $3 трлн коммерческих транзакций и около 95% операций в банкоматах мира обрабатывается именно этим языком. Такие системы не рассчитаны на резкие скачки, горизонтальное масштабирование и микросервисную архитектуру. При этом с каждым годом число людей, способных безопасно вносить изменения в такой код, сокращается — а значит, риск накапливается, даже если формально все «работает». Разбираемся подробнее, как написанный 65 лет назад код поддерживает современную мировую систему и скоро ли это изменится.
https://habr.com/ru/companies/onlinepatent/articles/1023236/
#cobol #cobolcraft #история_it #история_успеха #история_ит #история_создания #история_программирования #ibm #microsoft #anthropic
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COBOL: 65 лет в ядре мировой экономики
Каждый раз, когда за рубежом кто-то снимает деньги в банкомате, рассчитывается картой или получает государственное пособие, с высокой вероятностью где-то в цепочке выполняется код, написанный на COBOL — языке 1959 года. Ежедневно через COBOL-системы проходит на $3 трлн коммерческих транзакций и около 95% операций в банкоматах мира обрабатывается именно этим языком. Такие системы не рассчитаны на резкие скачки, горизонтальное масштабирование и микросервисную архитектуру. При этом с каждым годом число людей, способных безопасно вносить изменения в такой код, сокращается — а значит, риск накапливается, даже если формально все «работает». Разбираемся подробнее, как написанный 65 лет назад код поддерживает современную мировую систему и скоро ли это изменится.
https://habr.com/ru/companies/onlinepatent/articles/1023236/
#cobol #cobolcraft #история_it #история_успеха #история_ит #история_создания #история_программирования #ibm #microsoft #anthropic
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COBOL: 65 лет в ядре мировой экономики
Каждый раз, когда за рубежом кто-то снимает деньги в банкомате, рассчитывается картой или получает государственное пособие, с высокой вероятностью где-то в цепочке выполняется код, написанный на COBOL — языке 1959 года. Ежедневно через COBOL-системы проходит на $3 трлн коммерческих транзакций и около 95% операций в банкоматах мира обрабатывается именно этим языком. Такие системы не рассчитаны на резкие скачки, горизонтальное масштабирование и микросервисную архитектуру. При этом с каждым годом число людей, способных безопасно вносить изменения в такой код, сокращается — а значит, риск накапливается, даже если формально все «работает». Разбираемся подробнее, как написанный 65 лет назад код поддерживает современную мировую систему и скоро ли это изменится.
https://habr.com/ru/companies/onlinepatent/articles/1023236/
#cobol #cobolcraft #история_it #история_успеха #история_ит #история_создания #история_программирования #ibm #microsoft #anthropic
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Wired #magazine: #COBOL is the #asbestos of #programming #languages
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@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] purtroppo non è stata una mia scelta, ma aziendale, ma hai ragione, se qualcuno mi dicesse domani di tornare a sviluppare in #COBOL ci metterei al massimo mezz'ora a ricordarmi tutte le cose. Il #COBOL è sempre nel mio ❤️ -
I remember taking a C++ class where the teacher started the first lecture with "This is going to be a bit of an experiment. This is the first semester where this isn't a COBOL class."
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“Quantum computation is … nothing less than a distinctly new way of harnessing nature”*…
As the tools in the world around us change, the world– and we– change with them. The onslaught of AI is the change that seems to be grabbing most of our mindshare these days… and with reason. But there are, of course, other changes (in biotech, in materials science, et al.) that are also going to be hugely impactful.
Today, a look at the computing technology stalking up behind AI: quantum computing. As enthusiasts like David Deutsch (author of the quote above) argue, it can have tremendous benefits, perhaps especially in our ability to model (and thus better understand) our reality.
But quantum computing will, if/when it arrives, also present huge challenges to us as individuals and as societies– perhaps most prominently in its threat to the ways in which we protect our systems and our information: We’ve felt pretty safe for decades, secure in the knowledge that we could lose passwords to phising or hacks, but that it would take the “classical” computers we have 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption. A quantum computer could crack it in as little as a hundred seconds.
The technology has been “somewhere on the horizon” for 30 years… so not something that has seemed urgent to confront. But progress has accelerated; a recent Google paper reports on a programming and architectural breakthrough that greatly reduces the computing resources necessary to break classical cryptography… putting the prospect of “Q-Day” (the point at which quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard encryption methods (RSA, ECC), endangering global digital security) much closer, which would put everything from crypto-wallets to our e-banking accounts at risk.
Charlie Wood brings us up to speed…
Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world.
Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the ones that secured the then-emerging digital world. The trustworthiness of nearly every website, inbox, and bank account rests on the assumption that these two problems are impossible to solve. Shor’s algorithm proved that assumption wrong.
For 30 years, Shor’s algorithm has been a security threat in theory only. Physicists initially estimated that they would need a colossal quantum machine with billions of qubits — the elements used in quantum calculations — to run it. That estimate has come down drastically over the years, falling recently to a million qubits. But it has still always sat comfortably beyond the modest capabilities of existing quantum computers, which typically have just hundreds of qubits.
However, two different groups of researchers have just announced advances that notably reduce the gap between theoretical estimates and real machines. A star-studded team of quantum physicists at the California Institute of Technology went public with a design for a quantum computer that could break encryption with only tens of thousands of qubits and said that it had formed a company to build the machine. And researchers at Google announced that they had developed an implementation of Shor’s algorithm that is ten times as efficient as the best previous method.
Neither company has the hardware to break encryption today. But the results underscore what some quantum physicists had already come to suspect: that powerful quantum computers may be years away, rather than decades. “If you care about privacy or you have secrets, then you better start looking for alternatives,” said Nikolas Breuckmann, a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, who did not work on either of the papers.
While the new results may provide a jolt for the policymakers and corporations that guard our digital infrastructure, they also signal the rapid progress that physicists have made toward building machines that will let them more thoroughly explore the quantum world.
“We’re going to actually do this,” said Dolev Bluvstein, a Caltech physicist and CEO of the new company, Oratomic…
[Wood unpacks the history of the development of the technology and explores the challenges that remain; he concludes…]
… If any group succeeds at building a quantum computer that can realize Shor’s algorithm, it will mark the end an era — specifically, the “Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum” era, as Preskill dubbed the pre-error-correction period in a 2018 paper. Each researcher has a vision for what to pursue first with a machine in the new “fault-tolerant” era.
[Robert] Huang said he would start by running Shor’s algorithm, just to prove that the device works. After that, he said he would try to use it to speed up machine learning — an application to be detailed in coming work.
Most of the architects building quantum computers, whether at Oratomic or other startups, are physicists at heart. They’re interested in physics, not cryptography. Specifically, they’re interested in all the things a computer fluent in the language of quantum mechanics could teach them about the quantum realm, such as what sort of materials might become superconductors even at warm temperatures. Preskill, for his part, would like to simulate the quantum nature of space-time.
The Caltech group knows it has years of work ahead before any of its dreams have a chance of coming true. But the researchers can’t wait to get started. “Pick a cooler life quest than building the world’s first quantum computer with your friends!” said a jubilant Bluvstein, reached by phone shortly before their paper went live, before rushing off to celebrate…
Eminently worth reading in full: “New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever,” from @walkingthedot.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality
###
As we prepare, we might take a moment to appreciate just how vastly and deeply the legacy systems challenged by quantum computing run, recalling that on this date in 1959 Mary Hawes, a computer scientist for the Burroughs Corporation held a meeting of computers users, manufacturers, and academics at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at creating a common business oriented programming language. At the meeting, representative Grace Hopper suggested that they ask the Department of Defense to fund the effort to create such a language. Also attending was Charles Phillips who was director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD and was excited by the possibility of a common language streamlining their operations. He agreed to sponsor the creation of such a language. This was the genesis of what would eventually become the COBOL language.
To this day COBOL is still the most common programming language used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments, primarily on mainframe systems, with around 200 billion lines of code still in production use… all of which are in question and/or at risk in a world of quantum computing.
#COBOL #computerSecurity #computers #computing #crypto #cryptocurrency #culture #GraceHopper #history #MaryHawes #quantum #quantumComputing #Science #security #Technology -
“Quantum computation is … nothing less than a distinctly new way of harnessing nature”*…
As the tools in the world around us change, the world– and we– change with them. The onslaught of AI is the change that seems to be grabbing most of our mindshare these days… and with reason. But there are, of course, other changes (in biotech, in materials science, et al.) that are also going to be hugely impactful.
Today, a look at the computing technology stalking up behind AI: quantum computing. As enthusiasts like David Deutsch (author of the quote above) argue, it can have tremendous benefits, perhaps especially in our ability to model (and thus better understand) our reality.
But quantum computing will, if/when it arrives, also present huge challenges to us as individuals and as societies– perhaps most prominently in its threat to the ways in which we protect our systems and our information: We’ve felt pretty safe for decades, secure in the knowledge that we could lose passwords to phising or hacks, but that it would take the “classical” computers we have 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption. A quantum computer could crack it in as little as a hundred seconds.
The technology has been “somewhere on the horizon” for 30 years… so not something that has seemed urgent to confront. But progress has accelerated; a recent Google paper reports on a programming and architectural breakthrough that greatly reduces the computing resources necessary to break classical cryptography… putting the prospect of “Q-Day” (the point at which quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard encryption methods (RSA, ECC), endangering global digital security) much closer, which would put everything from crypto-wallets to our e-banking accounts at risk.
Charlie Wood brings us up to speed…
Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world.
Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the ones that secured the then-emerging digital world. The trustworthiness of nearly every website, inbox, and bank account rests on the assumption that these two problems are impossible to solve. Shor’s algorithm proved that assumption wrong.
For 30 years, Shor’s algorithm has been a security threat in theory only. Physicists initially estimated that they would need a colossal quantum machine with billions of qubits — the elements used in quantum calculations — to run it. That estimate has come down drastically over the years, falling recently to a million qubits. But it has still always sat comfortably beyond the modest capabilities of existing quantum computers, which typically have just hundreds of qubits.
However, two different groups of researchers have just announced advances that notably reduce the gap between theoretical estimates and real machines. A star-studded team of quantum physicists at the California Institute of Technology went public with a design for a quantum computer that could break encryption with only tens of thousands of qubits and said that it had formed a company to build the machine. And researchers at Google announced that they had developed an implementation of Shor’s algorithm that is ten times as efficient as the best previous method.
Neither company has the hardware to break encryption today. But the results underscore what some quantum physicists had already come to suspect: that powerful quantum computers may be years away, rather than decades. “If you care about privacy or you have secrets, then you better start looking for alternatives,” said Nikolas Breuckmann, a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, who did not work on either of the papers.
While the new results may provide a jolt for the policymakers and corporations that guard our digital infrastructure, they also signal the rapid progress that physicists have made toward building machines that will let them more thoroughly explore the quantum world.
“We’re going to actually do this,” said Dolev Bluvstein, a Caltech physicist and CEO of the new company, Oratomic…
[Wood unpacks the history of the development of the technology and explores the challenges that remain; he concludes…]
… If any group succeeds at building a quantum computer that can realize Shor’s algorithm, it will mark the end an era — specifically, the “Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum” era, as Preskill dubbed the pre-error-correction period in a 2018 paper. Each researcher has a vision for what to pursue first with a machine in the new “fault-tolerant” era.
[Robert] Huang said he would start by running Shor’s algorithm, just to prove that the device works. After that, he said he would try to use it to speed up machine learning — an application to be detailed in coming work.
Most of the architects building quantum computers, whether at Oratomic or other startups, are physicists at heart. They’re interested in physics, not cryptography. Specifically, they’re interested in all the things a computer fluent in the language of quantum mechanics could teach them about the quantum realm, such as what sort of materials might become superconductors even at warm temperatures. Preskill, for his part, would like to simulate the quantum nature of space-time.
The Caltech group knows it has years of work ahead before any of its dreams have a chance of coming true. But the researchers can’t wait to get started. “Pick a cooler life quest than building the world’s first quantum computer with your friends!” said a jubilant Bluvstein, reached by phone shortly before their paper went live, before rushing off to celebrate…
Eminently worth reading in full: “New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever,” from @walkingthedot.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* David Deutsch, The Fabric of Realityy
###
As we prepare, we might take a moment to appreciate just how vastly and deeply the legacy systems challenged by quantum computing run, recalling that on this date in 1959 Mary Hawes, a computer scientist for the Burroughs Corporation held a meeting of computers users, manufacturers, and academics at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at creating a common business oriented programming language. At the meeting, representative Grace Hopper suggested that they ask the Department of Defense to fund the effort to create such a language. Also attending was Charles Phillips who was director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD and was excited by the possibility of a common language streamlining their operations. He agreed to sponsor the creation of such a language. This was the genesis of what would eventually become the COBOL language.
To this day COBOL is still the most common programming language used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments, primarily on mainframe systems, with around 200 billion lines of code still in production use… all of which are in question and/or at risk in a world of quantum computing.
#COBOL #computerSecurity #computers #computing #crypto #cryptocurrency #culture #GraceHopper #history #MaryHawes #quantum #quantumComputing #Science #security #Technology -
“Quantum computation is … nothing less than a distinctly new way of harnessing nature”*…
As the tools in the world around us change, the world– and we– change with them. The onslaught of AI is the change that seems to be grabbing most of our mindshare these days… and with reason. But there are, of course, other changes (in biotech, in materials science, et al.) that are also going to be hugely impactful.
Today, a look at the computing technology stalking up behind AI: quantum computing. As enthusiasts like David Deutsch (author of the quote above) argue, it can have tremendous benefits, perhaps especially in our ability to model (and thus better understand) our reality.
But quantum computing will, if/when it arrives, also present huge challenges to us as individuals and as societies– perhaps most prominently in its threat to the ways in which we protect our systems and our information: We’ve felt pretty safe for decades, secure in the knowledge that we could lose passwords to phising or hacks, but that it would take the “classical” computers we have 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption. A quantum computer could crack it in as little as a hundred seconds.
The technology has been “somewhere on the horizon” for 30 years… so not something that has seemed urgent to confront. But progress has accelerated; a recent Google paper reports on a programming and architectural breakthrough that greatly reduces the computing resources necessary to break classical cryptography… putting the prospect of “Q-Day” (the point at which quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard encryption methods (RSA, ECC), endangering global digital security) much closer, which would put everything from crypto-wallets to our e-banking accounts at risk.
Charlie Wood brings us up to speed…
Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world.
Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the ones that secured the then-emerging digital world. The trustworthiness of nearly every website, inbox, and bank account rests on the assumption that these two problems are impossible to solve. Shor’s algorithm proved that assumption wrong.
For 30 years, Shor’s algorithm has been a security threat in theory only. Physicists initially estimated that they would need a colossal quantum machine with billions of qubits — the elements used in quantum calculations — to run it. That estimate has come down drastically over the years, falling recently to a million qubits. But it has still always sat comfortably beyond the modest capabilities of existing quantum computers, which typically have just hundreds of qubits.
However, two different groups of researchers have just announced advances that notably reduce the gap between theoretical estimates and real machines. A star-studded team of quantum physicists at the California Institute of Technology went public with a design for a quantum computer that could break encryption with only tens of thousands of qubits and said that it had formed a company to build the machine. And researchers at Google announced that they had developed an implementation of Shor’s algorithm that is ten times as efficient as the best previous method.
Neither company has the hardware to break encryption today. But the results underscore what some quantum physicists had already come to suspect: that powerful quantum computers may be years away, rather than decades. “If you care about privacy or you have secrets, then you better start looking for alternatives,” said Nikolas Breuckmann, a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, who did not work on either of the papers.
While the new results may provide a jolt for the policymakers and corporations that guard our digital infrastructure, they also signal the rapid progress that physicists have made toward building machines that will let them more thoroughly explore the quantum world.
“We’re going to actually do this,” said Dolev Bluvstein, a Caltech physicist and CEO of the new company, Oratomic…
[Wood unpacks the history of the development of the technology and explores the challenges that remain; he concludes…]
… If any group succeeds at building a quantum computer that can realize Shor’s algorithm, it will mark the end an era — specifically, the “Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum” era, as Preskill dubbed the pre-error-correction period in a 2018 paper. Each researcher has a vision for what to pursue first with a machine in the new “fault-tolerant” era.
[Robert] Huang said he would start by running Shor’s algorithm, just to prove that the device works. After that, he said he would try to use it to speed up machine learning — an application to be detailed in coming work.
Most of the architects building quantum computers, whether at Oratomic or other startups, are physicists at heart. They’re interested in physics, not cryptography. Specifically, they’re interested in all the things a computer fluent in the language of quantum mechanics could teach them about the quantum realm, such as what sort of materials might become superconductors even at warm temperatures. Preskill, for his part, would like to simulate the quantum nature of space-time.
The Caltech group knows it has years of work ahead before any of its dreams have a chance of coming true. But the researchers can’t wait to get started. “Pick a cooler life quest than building the world’s first quantum computer with your friends!” said a jubilant Bluvstein, reached by phone shortly before their paper went live, before rushing off to celebrate…
Eminently worth reading in full: “New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever,” from @walkingthedot.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* David Deutsch, The Fabric of Realityy
###
As we prepare, we might take a moment to appreciate just how vastly and deeply the legacy systems challenged by quantum computing run, recalling that on this date in 1959 Mary Hawes, a computer scientist for the Burroughs Corporation held a meeting of computers users, manufacturers, and academics at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at creating a common business oriented programming language. At the meeting, representative Grace Hopper suggested that they ask the Department of Defense to fund the effort to create such a language. Also attending was Charles Phillips who was director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD and was excited by the possibility of a common language streamlining their operations. He agreed to sponsor the creation of such a language. This was the genesis of what would eventually become the COBOL language.
To this day COBOL is still the most common programming language used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments, primarily on mainframe systems, with around 200 billion lines of code still in production use… all of which are in question and/or at risk in a world of quantum computing.
#COBOL #computerSecurity #computers #computing #crypto #cryptocurrency #culture #GraceHopper #history #MaryHawes #quantum #quantumComputing #Science #security #Technology -
“Quantum computation is … nothing less than a distinctly new way of harnessing nature”*…
As the tools in the world around us change, the world– and we– change with them. The onslaught of AI is the change that seems to be grabbing most of our mindshare these days… and with reason. But there are, of course, other changes (in biotech, in materials science, et al.) that are also going to be hugely impactful.
Today, a look at the computing technology stalking up behind AI: quantum computing. As enthusiasts like David Deutsch (author of the quote above) argue, it can have tremendous benefits, perhaps especially in our ability to model (and thus better understand) our reality.
But quantum computing will, if/when it arrives, also present huge challenges to us as individuals and as societies– perhaps most prominently in its threat to the ways in which we protect our systems and our information: We’ve felt pretty safe for decades, secure in the knowledge that we could lose passwords to phising or hacks, but that it would take the “classical” computers we have 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption. A quantum computer could crack it in as little as a hundred seconds.
The technology has been “somewhere on the horizon” for 30 years… so not something that has seemed urgent to confront. But progress has accelerated; a recent Google paper reports on a programming and architectural breakthrough that greatly reduces the computing resources necessary to break classical cryptography… putting the prospect of “Q-Day” (the point at which quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard encryption methods (RSA, ECC), endangering global digital security) much closer, which would put everything from crypto-wallets to our e-banking accounts at risk.
Charlie Wood brings us up to speed…
Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world.
Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the ones that secured the then-emerging digital world. The trustworthiness of nearly every website, inbox, and bank account rests on the assumption that these two problems are impossible to solve. Shor’s algorithm proved that assumption wrong.
For 30 years, Shor’s algorithm has been a security threat in theory only. Physicists initially estimated that they would need a colossal quantum machine with billions of qubits — the elements used in quantum calculations — to run it. That estimate has come down drastically over the years, falling recently to a million qubits. But it has still always sat comfortably beyond the modest capabilities of existing quantum computers, which typically have just hundreds of qubits.
However, two different groups of researchers have just announced advances that notably reduce the gap between theoretical estimates and real machines. A star-studded team of quantum physicists at the California Institute of Technology went public with a design for a quantum computer that could break encryption with only tens of thousands of qubits and said that it had formed a company to build the machine. And researchers at Google announced that they had developed an implementation of Shor’s algorithm that is ten times as efficient as the best previous method.
Neither company has the hardware to break encryption today. But the results underscore what some quantum physicists had already come to suspect: that powerful quantum computers may be years away, rather than decades. “If you care about privacy or you have secrets, then you better start looking for alternatives,” said Nikolas Breuckmann, a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, who did not work on either of the papers.
While the new results may provide a jolt for the policymakers and corporations that guard our digital infrastructure, they also signal the rapid progress that physicists have made toward building machines that will let them more thoroughly explore the quantum world.
“We’re going to actually do this,” said Dolev Bluvstein, a Caltech physicist and CEO of the new company, Oratomic…
[Wood unpacks the history of the development of the technology and explores the challenges that remain; he concludes…]
… If any group succeeds at building a quantum computer that can realize Shor’s algorithm, it will mark the end an era — specifically, the “Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum” era, as Preskill dubbed the pre-error-correction period in a 2018 paper. Each researcher has a vision for what to pursue first with a machine in the new “fault-tolerant” era.
[Robert] Huang said he would start by running Shor’s algorithm, just to prove that the device works. After that, he said he would try to use it to speed up machine learning — an application to be detailed in coming work.
Most of the architects building quantum computers, whether at Oratomic or other startups, are physicists at heart. They’re interested in physics, not cryptography. Specifically, they’re interested in all the things a computer fluent in the language of quantum mechanics could teach them about the quantum realm, such as what sort of materials might become superconductors even at warm temperatures. Preskill, for his part, would like to simulate the quantum nature of space-time.
The Caltech group knows it has years of work ahead before any of its dreams have a chance of coming true. But the researchers can’t wait to get started. “Pick a cooler life quest than building the world’s first quantum computer with your friends!” said a jubilant Bluvstein, reached by phone shortly before their paper went live, before rushing off to celebrate…
Eminently worth reading in full: “New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever,” from @walkingthedot.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality
###
As we prepare, we might take a moment to appreciate just how vastly and deeply the legacy systems challenged by quantum computing run, recalling that on this date in 1959 Mary Hawes, a computer scientist for the Burroughs Corporation held a meeting of computers users, manufacturers, and academics at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at creating a common business oriented programming language. At the meeting, representative Grace Hopper suggested that they ask the Department of Defense to fund the effort to create such a language. Also attending was Charles Phillips who was director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD and was excited by the possibility of a common language streamlining their operations. He agreed to sponsor the creation of such a language. This was the genesis of what would eventually become the COBOL language.
To this day COBOL is still the most common programming language used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments, primarily on mainframe systems, with around 200 billion lines of code still in production use… all of which are in question and/or at risk in a world of quantum computing.
#COBOL #computerSecurity #computers #computing #crypto #cryptocurrency #culture #GraceHopper #history #MaryHawes #quantum #quantumComputing #Science #security #Technology -
#OnThisDay Venus_de_Milo, the famous #Greek #Sculpture, was discovered (1820) by a peasant.
Grace Hopper led development of #COBOL (1959).
Birth Anniversary of American #Biochemist Melvin Calvin (1911) - most famed for discovering the Calvin cycle along with Andrew Benson and James Bassham, for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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#cobol #mainframe programming is insane, ha. Less really because of the language, and more because of the wild environment. This is old, yeah, but it seems very similar to modern ways. #retrocomputing
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COBOL on a MacBook? Yes, really.
I took a legacy COBOL workload and modernized it using Java + the Foreign Function & Memory API (FFM). No mainframe needed.
This is a practical way to bridge old and new systems without rewriting everything.
👉 https://www.the-main-thread.com/p/cobol-java-ffm-modernization-macbook
