The Guardian tech recently featured an article on COBOL celebrating its 50th Anniversary. If you have not read it yet, you can read at http://tinyurl.com/dd399q.

Normally the way I get to know these featured articles have been published, is through an email from our PR agency. But this time around they were beaten by twitter. I regularly monitor the twitter channel on certain keywords and one of them happen to be "COBOL". Over the easter weekend there was such a flurry of activity about the article, it was the first time I have seen so much activity around COBOL on twitter! Check it out for yourself at: http://tinyurl.com/djdmoa.

There was a lot of positive tweets (for those unfamiliar with the twitter world, a tweet is a single micro-blog post on twitter, not longer than 140 characters). But, not quite unexpectedly, there were many who were surprised and event in despair that COBOL continues to thrive. I was able to have some interesting conversations with many of them.

What surprised most people was how much COBOL was still around, and just that fact that COBOL was used. Period.

If you are not following Micro Focus on twitter yet, you can follow us at: @microfocus. And lets hear it for COBOL!