Yesterday I started to learn a “new” language: COBOL.

I installed GnuCOBOL on a Proxmox LXC container and wrote my first COBOL program, of course a Hello, World! program.

       identification division.
       program-id. hello.
      * Author:      Cees van de Griend
      * Date:        2025-08-20
      * Licence:     EUPL-1.2
      * Description: Hello, World!
       environment division.
       procedure division.
           display "Hello, World!".
           stop run.

There is a lot of documentation on the website of GnuCOBOL:

At the moment I find it refreshing to learn a 65 years old programming language which is still very much in use today.

I especially like that it makes me think back to the days I learned to program with Turbo Pascal 3 in the old days of MS-DOS 3.31 on a Vendex Headstart III.

If I recall correctly I paid NLG 6000 for the desktop computer with a color VGA monitor, keyboard, mouse (an extra luxury item) and a 40 MB hard disk. It had a “fast” 80286 processor and I believe I put in an extra 2 GB of ram by inserting 8 256KB chips on the main board.