>You want old? My first (professional) job was with a software house whose product was written in assembler. We rewrote in COBOL to get with the new stuff.

Yep, you're old. <g>

I learned COBOL at my first job. I worked for Travelers Insurance Company in Hartford, straight out of college. Their practice at the time was to hire about 15-20 people who had just graduated with Computer Science degrees (or at least a minor, which is what I had having majored in Math) ... throw them all into class for a few weeks to teach them COBOL, structured programming (which some of already knew from college) and JCL (needed to run the jobs from the punch cards) and then when the class was over, divvy them up into various departments throughout the company. They did this every few months, because I remember there being another new training class starting just a couple of weeks after ours was over.

>Actually I liked assembler a lot. I haven't used it in over 20 years but could probably still bang out some BAL code if I had to.

I liked Assembler too, although I doubt I could even remember any of it. I learned while I was in college, but not in any classes. I worked part-time at the computer center on campus to earn enough to pay my tuition and books. At first I did operations stuff, cleaning the tape drives, taking the jobs off of the printer, etc. Later they gave me little programming jobs ... that's how I learned Assembler ... for IBM 370.

~~Bonnie