Just a note on FORTRAN (which I also used for about a decade) vs. COBOL. It's important to remember that FORTRAN could not deal easily with character data unti

Just a note on FORTRAN (which I also used for about a decade) vs. COBOL. It's important to remember that FORTRAN could not deal easily with character data until FORTRAN-77 which introduced the CHARACTER type. Prior to that you stored character data in arrays of 4-byte words, INTs if I recall correctly. It was really painful to use for data manipulation and reports which were among the main forms of output at the time. I'm also a big FORTRAN fan, especially the VAX-FORTRAN variant DEC introduced in the 1980s. It was great for numerical analysis but also included library calls to access the operating system, much like C. Some of us were late to the Unix party, so this was a huge step forward.