I can't answer your last question, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. From what I've seen there are z/OS emulators that can be used for practice, so i

I can't answer your last question, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. From what I've seen there are z/OS emulators that can be used for practice, so it wouldn't be far fetched to transition to real hardware from there. A quick search for COBOL resources yielded https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-course https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co... , so it seems possible to learn without access to the hardware.