>We've got the mainframe, but I refuse to touch CRUDBALL (as Dr. "Crazy" Dave Morgan would've referred to COBOL as). My COBOL instructor, I think, was the one who said that the language was invented with the intent of being able to hire winos off the street to be programmers.

When I was learning those things (somewhere around cenosoic), the explanation was "they needed a programming language that even army officers could understand".

Actually, it's a great language, if you like epic poetry. And it's sexy in a way, because there's at least six pages of foreplay before you get to write a statement which does something.

I admit I've spent almost three years doing Cobol... and I'm happy it's so far in the past :).