I recall taking a course in the #COBOL language back in the MSDOS days. They were offering COBOL and #Fortran courses for that semester only. Not owning a computer at the time, I wasn’t stuck trying to buy a compiler ... but it did mean that I had to wait for access to one of the two computers in the campus labs which had the software ... and adhere to their strict limits on how much time I could spend on said machine.

I’d type in my program and get fifty or seventy five errors. It would turn out that most of those errors were really cascading from me putting the sections in the wrong order or starting a line in the wrong column.

I did not get a good grade in that course. I’ve always wanted to try COBOL again, just to see whether it was just the fact that I was too broke to buy a computer and compiler.

I went back to my business courses and eventually earned a degree.