Attendees cheered in response to newtechnicalfeatures, such as higher-resolution displays and more memory on new MacBook Pro laptops, along with little tweaks like a feature for iPhones that lets people use the Facetime video chat service on cellular networks.
While COBOL has not gone away at the banks, more and more of the technical staff spend their time programming newfeatures and interfaces in modern languages and web application frameworks that provide highly applicable and transferable skills to startups only too happy to hire them for their technical training and domain experience.