IBM Launches New COBOL Training Initiative

[rprosperi]

IBM Launches New COBOL Training Initiative

In High School in the early 70's, we had access to a PDP-8 via 110-baud dial-up link to a neighboring town's private/exclusive school system, on which we able to use FOCAL, BASIC, FORTRAN and COBOL. The instructor demonstrated to us that a working COBOL program could be caused to generate 3+ pages(!) of error messages during the compile phase by simply misplacing a single period.

When asked 'Why then would one want to learn COBOL?' he replied 'To be sure you can always get a programming job!' He emphasized, somewhat prophetically, that 'there will always be a demand for COBOL programmers, for at least 50 years.' I sure would like to be able to track him down today to show him this article.