Good afternoon, everybody.

Just to remind folks what our plan is for the next couple of months.

Early on in the pandemic, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy held these regular press conferences.

This one was in April of 2020. Unemployment was skyrocketing.

Almost 17 million claims had been filed

around the country in the previous three weeks. President Trump had just signed the CARES Act, which

gave unemployed workers another 600 bucks on top of state benefits. And New Jersey's unemployment

website kept crashing as people tried to sign up. So Murphy came to this press conference with a request.

And secondly, in our list of volunteers, Judy, not only do we need health care workers, but

given the legacy systems, we should add a page for cobalt computer skills.

He actually meant cobal, which stands for common business-oriented language.

Murphy said he needed cobalt programmers to help get things running again.

But literally, we have systems that are 40-plus years old,

and there'll be lots of post-mortems, and one of them on our list will be how the heck

that we get here when we literally needed cobalt programmers.

Cobalt has been around since the 60s.

And like a lot of, say, concrete that was poured in that decade, we've done a lot of building on top of it.

One thing we built on top was basic government services.

In April 2020, the predicament Murphy faced became international news. There were stories that people couldn't get

their money because their systems were running on what is basically an ancient language.

He was blaming these old cobal systems. That's journalist Clive Thompson, who's written extensively about COBOL.

He started looking into what happened.

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