Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECTIP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate—that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia

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All hail the Corporate States of America!! Disagree at your own peril.

Well, I got open-cobol to compile and run a simple "Hello Word" program. So it works.

It seems that Cobol is still in the punch card age in which commands have to start in the 8th column. But open-cobol has a freestyle option.

(e:paul) wanted to see some code:

Here's the sort of COBOL"hello world" I remember from my college days:

000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000200 PROGRAM-ID. HELLOWORLD.
000300
000400*
000500 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
000600 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
000700 SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000800 OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000900
001000 DATA DIVISION.
001100 FILE SECTION.
001200
100000 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
100100
100200 MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.
100300 BEGIN.
100400 DISPLAY " " LINE 1 POSITION 1 ERASE EOS.
100500 DISPLAY "Hello world!" LINE 15 POSITION 10.
100600 STOP RUN.
100700 MAIN-LOGIC-EXIT.
100800 EXIT.

Here's the same thing freestyled in open-cobol.

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY 'Hello world!'.
STOP RUN.

Based on conversations at (e:pmt)'s New Years party, being a dinosaur with some vague 30 year old course work in Cobol makes me somewhat marketable if I brush up on my Cobol coding skills.

Well, there is something called Open Cobol that is Cobol compiler that runs on linux. Fedora has it in it's repositories.

Hopefully, I can get it to work. And code, code, code my way into a new job.

I hope y'all had a fun time at Beer Club. Perhaps if Jupiter aligns with Mars and Peace guides the Planets or I get fired, I'll make it to Beer Club in February.