I remember about 55 years ago learning Cobol B using a Honeywell mainframe…using IBM punch cards and flow charts. Yes, even a missing or misplaced character wrecked the compilation process. I liked writing programs with Cobol. It was easy and all you needed was enough logic to get from point A to B.

I hear the government still runs programs using Cobol. We had a kind of preview of what computers and programming could be like when in Star Trek they spoke English to the computer and got real time answers in English.