Aging & Wisdom Quote by Vinton Cerf

Cerf’s line is a tidy reality check disguised as a nerdy punchline: the reason ancient tech keeps haunting modern systems isn’t ignorance, nostalgia, or corporate laziness (though those help). It’s fitness. “Things that work persist” is evolutionary logic smuggled into a software quip, and COBOL is the perfect specimen because it’s both maligned and indispensable.

The joke lands because it pokes at a familiar cultural myth in tech: that progress is a clean sequence of replacements, a heroic march from obsolete to shiny. Cerf flips that story. In the real world, infrastructure doesn’t vanish just because engineers roll their eyes at it. It persists because it’s embedded in payrolls, banking ledgers, government benefits, airline reservations - the places where uptime matters more than elegance and where rewriting a working system is less “innovation” than high-stakes surgery.

Subtextually, he’s also defending a deeply Cerf-ish view of engineering: the highest virtue isn’t novelty; it’s reliability at scale. Coming from one of the architects of the internet, the remark carries a quiet warning about technological amnesia. We love to sneer at legacy code until we realize modern life is a stack of compromises held together by proven tools and institutional memory.

The “floating around” phrasing is key: COBOL isn’t triumphant, it’s persistent, like driftwood in an ocean of new frameworks. Cerf is telling us that durability is its own kind of success - and that the future is mostly built on whatever refused to break.