I used COBOL on PDP 11/7X (RSTS/E) and VAXen (VMS) back in the 80s, and on IBM mainframes (I graduated in '85). I can't say that I was a big fan of the language

I used COBOL on PDP 11/7X (RSTS/E) and VAXen (VMS) back in the 80s, and on IBM mainframes (I graduated in '85). I can't say that I was a big fan of the language, or the SCREEN SECTION specifically. The SCREEN SECTION is basically a description of labels, input fields, and display areas and where they appear on the screen (line, column). The COBOL program can reference the input fields and display areas as a variable. Typically you would use the 'move' statement to copy a value from a variable or a literal to the display variable. I don't know that anyone would ever want to do things the same way today. Today we expect interfaces to adjust to the available screen and font size, which to the best of my recollection was not something that the old COBOL screens could do. There are still 'text-based user interface' tools available, although the modern approach is to link them into the program as a library rather than having them built into the language runtime. The curses (or ncurses) and s-lang libraries are what comes to mind.