I learned to program in COBOL in 1975 on an IBM System 3/10. It had less memory than your Commodore, 24K (yes, K!) of genuine ferrite core memory. Input was through the proprietary 96 column cards. All source code was kept on card decks, so dropping a deck was a really annoying thing. Much worse was the time our system operator pulled out too many drawers at once and the entire source cabinet toppled over, spilling all the contents. At least our keypunch operators had set up program cards to auto-dup the program name into columns 73-80 so a couple of intense hours at the card sorter straightened out the mess.
The memories are flooding back. I remember that my first paragraph in every Cobol program I wrote in my 30 year career was named HIHOAG. It still makes me smile.
I have fond memories of programming in COBOL for my first full time job in the late 1990s. I would have loved to had played with COBOL on my C128 before then but learned more than enough in college. COBOL is fun and easy. It’s wonderful seeing others enjoy this too... especially on my favorite 8-bit computer. Great video. 🙂
I took a COBOL class back in 1982. It was right after the school purchased a few terminals and stopped using punch cards. It was easy to get a job programming in COBOL on a mainframe, and I did it for 30+ years. It was a highly paid job, especially during the Y2K scare. The market salary for a senior developer was $160K in 2017. After 1997, there was a huge lack of COBOL programmers, so most companies started sending work overseas or paying for VISAs to bring people full-time into the U.S. Most colleges had abandoned MF languages and were teaching only C/C++, Java, etc. That was a big mistake, as foreigners took over the high-paying jobs at government institutions and banks.
I never had a chance to learn COBOL but heard a lot about it during college years. It's great to see what the language looks like now. Thanks for sharing.
Yes I was one of those people being taught COBOL in the mid 80s, at least it was on a PC rather than a punch and wait. The 128 COBOL looks quite well thought out and usable. Thanks for presenting the demo. A trip in to my history. Keep them coming.
When I went to community college back in the mid 90s I started out signed up for a computer science major. In the first two years I went through BASIC (which I already knew pretty thoroughly), COBOL, Pascal, and Fortran, I forget in what order. I’m not sure about the BASIC class but the other three at least used their Vax mainframe shared by a bunch of dumb terminals. We had to type in our programs, run them through an assembler, then through a compiler, and then finally run the program. While we could see the output on the screens, that output was also captured and sent to their shared printer which spit out 11x17 green bar. I think it was one of those chain printers, or possibly a daisy wheel. Of course all that programming skill is a distant memory but I still have the text books if I wanted to relearn how to program in them. I would just need something that was compatible with what the books taught and not system-specific, like C64 BASIC vs. PC BASIC.
My program in college had 3 COBOL courses. My final year, the exam was to debug a COBOL print out. This was in 1995. If I had of known, I would of protested them forcing me to learn this archaic language in 1995 especially when they could have been introducing us to HTML. I was quite good at it, but alas, never used it again!
I learned COBOL in 1990 in college and used it at my first job on a Tandem NONSTOP mainframe which are used in banks and stock exchanges where they can't afford to ever go down. When I left that job, I wasn't doing COBOL any more. My next job was COBOL again. Haven't done it since but I always figured if things got really bad I would go back to COBOL. I liked it. I took typing in high school so the verbosity doesn't bother me. I like that it is English-like and easy to read and understand. C and Perl look like chicken scratches.
@@timlocke3159 Hey, as a career Cobol programmer, I kind of like the syntax of C. However, it seems like a lot of modern languages somewhat like originality, since they borrow the common syntax from C. But those who balk at looking at Cobol, I can just think how they take to handling mainframe assembly language.
I bet that compiler wasn't cheap, back then. Your AI pics were interesting. I learned COBOL on an IBM 360 in the late 1970s. I used flow charts, coding sheets and printer layout forms and punched 80 col cards, that we fed into a card reader ourselves. If there were bugs that caused your program to crash, known as ABEND, you had to look through possibly hundreds of pages of hexadecimal data to track down the bug. And yes it usually took hours to get results... printouts. back. There was a machine (called a collator, if I remember) that used those sequence numbers, that could put your cards in proper sequence if you dropped them. I use GnuCOBOL sometimes today to write COBOL, on Linux.
Must check this out. I haven’t done any COBOL since college. It was weird, old and I kinda liked it. And that was in the mid-90’s. At least we were doing our coding on VT100 terminals
Managed to get my C128D stable enough to run through this. Had a blast. Wish I still had my printouts from projects back in the day. As mentioned above we had terminals that we used to connect to a Unix box that had COBOL compiler and we did all our work there rather than punch cards. But to get a copy of our code we literally had to send it to a line printer in the lab. I had a few printouts of my projects in a binder for years but it got dumped at some point when moving apartment or something.
OMG, I had this same Compiler back in the 80's. Back then the version I had was copy protected. Though, looking about the file-control section, not sure what's the significance of the drive model type. Would have thought specifying either disk or printer could have suffice. Though, it amazes me, about the differences between learning Cobol on academic basis vs coding in the real world.
Just curious, but in what step is it compiling the code, when you save it, or when you run it? I saw you run it, and thought I missed something. I learned Cobol in college, in the early '90s. I took a couple courses where we used it, one for JCL, and one for Cobol itself. My memory is in the JCL course, we used VT3270 terminals hooked up to an MVS mainframe. We wrote some Cobol in that. There was one part where we were submitting forms through the terminal. I don't know what that was in connection to, but the reason that stuck with me is when I got on the web, the way we submitted forms through a web browser felt very familiar. It took me back to the forms we submitted through the 3270 terminal. It was the same sort of action. You'd receive a form on the screen. You'd fill it in, then hit a "Send" button on the keyboard, which would send the form to the mainframe, and you'd get a response form back. What we were told was these forms were submitted to the mainframe using emulated punch cards, since the mainframe still expected cards. The response forms may have been emulated cards, as well. What I remember about the Cobol class was we used DOS PCs to edit and compile our programs. The development package we used was made by a company that's still around, as I recall. Though, I forget the name now. I just remember seeing ads for it in the last 10 years. As I remember, it used the Cobol87 standard, at the time. It was a nice environment. It had a competent editor and debugger, and I could understand the error messages. While the syntax and program structure was easy for me to pick up, it was an adjustment getting used to how it did records, because I thought they'd be like Pascal records, where the fields were local to the record type. Not so. They were global. The record structure just existed to group the fields for reads and writes. So, I had to think back to how I programmed in Basic (where all variables were global) to get my bearings on how to name my record fields, so they wouldn't clash with each other.
Nice! Not many COBOL programmers, myself included, would know how to write the boilerplate DIVISIONs. Every program I wrote started by taking the DIVISIONs from another COBOL program.
I was always intrested in COBOL, but way back int my C128 time i never heard about a c128 Cobol. Or was it absurdly expensive? I just found a C/PM Version that i never got to work..
Oh, this would be awesome if you can get to create sprites and create a game. The labeling of non character players and communicating with the users would be so much easier to code. I was at a community college and we used punch cards and terminals on a Honeywell system.
I was so tempted to add this to the video and I didn't because I thought it was too 'in the weeds'. Now I kind of wish I did, but here it is: In the configuration section, you can add this under the OBJECT-COMPUTER. C128. line: SPECIAL-NAMES. CURRENCY SIGN IS "E" (Or whatever currency you would like to use instead of the default of $) DECIMAL-POINT is COMMA.
I've not ever seen COBAL. To me, it seems very incomprehensible and ridiculous. I've been trying to learn x64 assembly too. Yes that includes reading the Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual
Hi, cobol is very structured and rigid, you just need to get used to its syntax and the right line spacong routine eg position 7 position 12 After Cobol i studies Pascal, then Visual basic..... On dos machines Turbo pascal is cool
When COBOL came out in 1959, the only other big, popular language that existed was FORTRAN which came out in 1957 and was only two years old. FORTRAN was for scientists and engineers. COBOL was for business. Take your pick! COBOL's syntax is verbose but it is easy to read, even for non-programmers, which was considered a plus. ALGOL came in 1958 but wasn't as common, Lisp in 1960, BASIC in 1964, Pascal in 1970, C in 1972, Ada in 1980, C++ in 1985, Visual Basic and Python both came in 1991.
COBOL, what an awful language. I would have been reaching for C or Pascal or even Forth given the hardware options - but it is cool to see how they ported great evil to the system so people could play IBM mainframe at home.
I learned to program in COBOL in 1975 on an IBM System 3/10. It had less memory than your Commodore, 24K (yes, K!) of genuine ferrite core memory. Input was through the proprietary 96 column cards. All source code was kept on card decks, so dropping a deck was a really annoying thing. Much worse was the time our system operator pulled out too many drawers at once and the entire source cabinet toppled over, spilling all the contents. At least our keypunch operators had set up program cards to auto-dup the program name into columns 73-80 so a couple of intense hours at the card sorter straightened out the mess.
The memories are flooding back. I remember that my first paragraph in every Cobol program I wrote in my 30 year career was named HIHOAG. It still makes me smile.
I have fond memories of programming in COBOL for my first full time job in the late 1990s. I would have loved to had played with COBOL on my C128 before then but learned more than enough in college. COBOL is fun and easy. It’s wonderful seeing others enjoy this too... especially on my favorite 8-bit computer. Great video. 🙂
I learned COBOL in the 80s, still using today for work.
I took a COBOL class back in 1982. It was right after the school purchased a few terminals and stopped using punch cards. It was easy to get a job programming in COBOL on a mainframe, and I did it for 30+ years. It was a highly paid job, especially during the Y2K scare. The market salary for a senior developer was $160K in 2017. After 1997, there was a huge lack of COBOL programmers, so most companies started sending work overseas or paying for VISAs to bring people full-time into the U.S. Most colleges had abandoned MF languages and were teaching only C/C++, Java, etc. That was a big mistake, as foreigners took over the high-paying jobs at government institutions and banks.
I never had a chance to learn COBOL but heard a lot about it during college years. It's great to see what the language looks like now. Thanks for sharing.
Yes I was one of those people being taught COBOL in the mid 80s, at least it was on a PC rather than a punch and wait. The 128 COBOL looks quite well thought out and usable. Thanks for presenting the demo. A trip in to my history. Keep them coming.
nice video! cool Cobol environment!
I am really enjoying these videos.
This takes me back! In the beginning....
When I went to community college back in the mid 90s I started out signed up for a computer science major. In the first two years I went through BASIC (which I already knew pretty thoroughly), COBOL, Pascal, and Fortran, I forget in what order. I’m not sure about the BASIC class but the other three at least used their Vax mainframe shared by a bunch of dumb terminals. We had to type in our programs, run them through an assembler, then through a compiler, and then finally run the program. While we could see the output on the screens, that output was also captured and sent to their shared printer which spit out 11x17 green bar. I think it was one of those chain printers, or possibly a daisy wheel. Of course all that programming skill is a distant memory but I still have the text books if I wanted to relearn how to program in them. I would just need something that was compatible with what the books taught and not system-specific, like C64 BASIC vs. PC BASIC.
My program in college had 3 COBOL courses. My final year, the exam was to debug a COBOL print out. This was in 1995. If I had of known, I would of protested them forcing me to learn this archaic language in 1995 especially when they could have been introducing us to HTML. I was quite good at it, but alas, never used it again!
To be fair you can make more money today writing cobol than writing plain HTML 😅
I learned COBOL in 1990 in college and used it at my first job on a Tandem NONSTOP mainframe which are used in banks and stock exchanges where they can't afford to ever go down. When I left that job, I wasn't doing COBOL any more. My next job was COBOL again. Haven't done it since but I always figured if things got really bad I would go back to COBOL. I liked it. I took typing in high school so the verbosity doesn't bother me. I like that it is English-like and easy to read and understand. C and Perl look like chicken scratches.
@@timlocke3159 Hey, as a career Cobol programmer, I kind of like the syntax of C. However, it seems like a lot of modern languages somewhat like originality, since they borrow the common syntax from C. But those who balk at looking at Cobol, I can just think how they take to handling mainframe assembly language.
I bet that compiler wasn't cheap, back then. Your AI pics were interesting. I learned COBOL on an IBM 360 in the late 1970s. I used flow charts, coding sheets and printer layout forms and punched 80 col cards, that we fed into a card reader ourselves. If there were bugs that caused your program to crash, known as ABEND, you had to look through possibly hundreds of pages of hexadecimal data to track down the bug. And yes it usually took hours to get results... printouts. back. There was a machine (called a collator, if I remember) that used those sequence numbers, that could put your cards in proper sequence if you dropped them. I use GnuCOBOL sometimes today to write COBOL, on Linux.
Must check this out. I haven’t done any COBOL since college. It was weird, old and I kinda liked it. And that was in the mid-90’s. At least we were doing our coding on VT100 terminals
Managed to get my C128D stable enough to run through this. Had a blast. Wish I still had my printouts from projects back in the day. As mentioned above we had terminals that we used to connect to a Unix box that had COBOL compiler and we did all our work there rather than punch cards. But to get a copy of our code we literally had to send it to a line printer in the lab. I had a few printouts of my projects in a binder for years but it got dumped at some point when moving apartment or something.
I've written COBOL in school in the mid 1980s on an IBM System/360. Wound up instead using RPG II (same system and others) for a few years after.
That looked painful, but I was enthralled.
OMG, I had this same Compiler back in the 80's. Back then the version I had was copy protected. Though, looking about the file-control section, not sure what's the significance of the drive model type. Would have thought specifying either disk or printer could have suffice. Though, it amazes me, about the differences between learning Cobol on academic basis vs coding in the real world.
*COBOL is STILL CONSTANTLY being used in Banks*
Just curious, but in what step is it compiling the code, when you save it, or when you run it? I saw you run it, and thought I missed something.
I learned Cobol in college, in the early '90s. I took a couple courses where we used it, one for JCL, and one for Cobol itself. My memory is in the JCL course, we used VT3270 terminals hooked up to an MVS mainframe. We wrote some Cobol in that. There was one part where we were submitting forms through the terminal. I don't know what that was in connection to, but the reason that stuck with me is when I got on the web, the way we submitted forms through a web browser felt very familiar. It took me back to the forms we submitted through the 3270 terminal. It was the same sort of action. You'd receive a form on the screen. You'd fill it in, then hit a "Send" button on the keyboard, which would send the form to the mainframe, and you'd get a response form back. What we were told was these forms were submitted to the mainframe using emulated punch cards, since the mainframe still expected cards. The response forms may have been emulated cards, as well.
What I remember about the Cobol class was we used DOS PCs to edit and compile our programs. The development package we used was made by a company that's still around, as I recall. Though, I forget the name now. I just remember seeing ads for it in the last 10 years. As I remember, it used the Cobol87 standard, at the time.
It was a nice environment. It had a competent editor and debugger, and I could understand the error messages. While the syntax and program structure was easy for me to pick up, it was an adjustment getting used to how it did records, because I thought they'd be like Pascal records, where the fields were local to the record type. Not so. They were global. The record structure just existed to group the fields for reads and writes. So, I had to think back to how I programmed in Basic (where all variables were global) to get my bearings on how to name my record fields, so they wouldn't clash with each other.
Common Boilerplate-Oriented Language
Nice! Not many COBOL programmers, myself included, would know how to write the boilerplate DIVISIONs. Every program I wrote started by taking the DIVISIONs from another COBOL program.
I was always intrested in COBOL, but way back int my C128 time i never heard about a c128 Cobol. Or was it absurdly expensive? I just found a C/PM Version that i never got to work..
The reviewers considered it too slow at the time. However, they hated Cobol as well so perhaps a bit biased :))
Oh, this would be awesome if you can get to create sprites and create a game. The labeling of non character players and communicating with the users would be so much easier to code. I was at a community college and we used punch cards and terminals on a Honeywell system.
For the Europeans, decimal point is comma;
I was so tempted to add this to the video and I didn't because I thought it was too 'in the weeds'. Now I kind of wish I did, but here it is:
In the configuration section, you can add this under the OBJECT-COMPUTER. C128. line:
SPECIAL-NAMES.
CURRENCY SIGN IS "E" (Or whatever currency you would like to use instead of the default of $)
DECIMAL-POINT is COMMA.
@@MyDeveloperThoughts Video Part 2!! :P "Advanced Topics" .. Decimal Math, String/UnString routines, Tables, Sub-routines, ...
I've not ever seen COBAL. To me, it seems very incomprehensible and ridiculous.
I've been trying to learn x64 assembly too. Yes that includes reading the Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual
Hi, cobol is very structured and rigid, you just need to get used to its syntax and the right line spacong routine eg position 7 position 12
After Cobol i studies Pascal, then Visual basic..... On dos machines Turbo pascal is cool
When COBOL came out in 1959, the only other big, popular language that existed was FORTRAN which came out in 1957 and was only two years old. FORTRAN was for scientists and engineers. COBOL was for business. Take your pick!
COBOL's syntax is verbose but it is easy to read, even for non-programmers, which was considered a plus.
ALGOL came in 1958 but wasn't as common, Lisp in 1960, BASIC in 1964, Pascal in 1970, C in 1972, Ada in 1980, C++ in 1985, Visual Basic and Python both came in 1991.
COBOL, what an awful language. I would have been reaching for C or Pascal or even Forth given the hardware options - but it is cool to see how they ported great evil to the system so people could play IBM mainframe at home.