[sailor4321]

Cobol was what we used to "program" for the 1401 all the stuff previously done on accounting machines. Imagine my dismay when I discovered it wasn't "common" or "ordinary" or "business oriented" (but, I admit, it was a lot more of those things than Fortran was!).

[NCjim]

And PL/1 was the best of both. It had remnants of each, especially in the variable declaration statements, e.g. P'999V99' for you COBOL programmers out there.

[forsnax5]

I never did Cobol on the 1401. When the 360 came out, I did RPG for about a decade, then a bit of Basic on the Wang VS. I got into Cobol late -- actually when the first PCs came out. RM-Cobol on CPM in 1981. Moved it to System/38 in 1982, been there ever since (AS400 was new hardware for the S/38 OS).