My first job out of school was programming in COBOL. Never learned it in school. I knew C, Scheme, Pascal, BASIC, a little FORTRAN, and maybe a couple of others

My first job out of school was programming in COBOL. Never learned it in school. I knew C, Scheme, Pascal, BASIC, a little FORTRAN, and maybe a couple of others. COBOL was easy to pick up. Never did really get JCL. The time sharing wasn't that great. Yes the there were hundreds of users but they could wait many seconds, even minutes for transactions to run. There was a little clock icon on the status line of the terminal, and I easily spent an hour or more per day just watching that clock, waiting on my terminal to update. Luckily the there was no www then, or I would have been surfing during that time and even less productive.