The on-line systems failed to meet their start deadline by hours and resulted in the loss of valuable trade and a tarnished reputation, despite the efforts of costly damage control instigated by customer relations. The cause of the problem was the addition of a new application, which had monopolized the hardware resources during the nightly batch run. Even now more money was being spent upgrading the CPUs and hard disk devices, so that the catastrophe wouldnt recur. The situation could describe any company, anywhere, any when, and any application. Blinkered management and ill-informed specialists still pontificate, that a programmers time is their most expensive resource and that programs should be written to work, and not to work efficiently. This book dismantles these traditional ideas and demonstrates how highly efficient and maintainable COBOL Applications can be written, and includes many examples of SECTION and program optimizing as well as discourses into VSAM, JES2 JCL and online programming.