It must have been a pretty good Cobol course. I had worked on IBM 402 &=20
403 accounting machines in my early days at IBM and took COBOL in the=20
later years when I returned to college. COBOL (at least at that time)=20
was simply an accounting machine emulator. One quarter was all that=20
there was for COBOL at my school. You could take another to learn=20
sorting with COBOL though. Sorting lengthy data files on a slow machine=20
utilizing half a dozen tape drives for intermediate storage was a little=20
different then.
COBOL still exists because it is still the best at what it does.

On 3/18/2013 1:40 PM, Harold Hallikainen wrote:
>> On Mar 18, 2013, at 7:16 AM, John Gardner wrote:
>>
>>> Another of Adm. Hopper's projects was a compiler - The first compiler
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_compiler_construction#First_comp=
ilers
>>
>> She also designed COBOL=85  (I wonder how she felt about that, given the
>> general disdain for COBOL in "Computer Science" circles.)
>>
>> BillW
>
> I took a semester of COBOL. We'd punch our cards, walk over to the HP
> clone, drop the cards in and push RUN. I remember COBOL as being verbose.
> For example, you'd say
>
> multiply A by B giving C
>
> or you could say
>
> calculate C=3DA*B
>
> I really liked the instructor in that class. One time I was debugging my
> class assignment. I took my printout up to him. He looked at it a while
> and then said "Sure glad it's your problem."
>
> Harold
>
>
>
>

--=20
John Ferrell W8CCW
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
P.C. HODGELL
  =20


--=20
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