MY MEMORIES

Charles Glenn Petersen

Northwest Missouri State University

In August of 1972 we moved to a small rental 3-bedroom house a few blocks south of the campus. We knew it would be temporary as we planned to find a contractor and have a new house built. More on the house later.

Before we arrived in Missouri, I was told the courses I would be teaching. One of those courses was Beginning COBOL, a programming language used widely for business applications. I knew absolutely nothing about COBOL although I had written computer code in several different kinds of programming languages. COBOL was never even mentioned in all of the computer science courses I had taken, but how difficult could it be, I thought, it is just another computer language.

I got a programming manual from a neighbor down the street in Ames who was an accountant. COBOL turned out to be quite different from any of the programming languages I had used before and unfortunately I had no way to practice using COBOL, but I had confidence in my ability to pick it up quickly as it was only a beginning course.

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