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Comment by brakmic | Hacker News Reader

Start from here: http://www.hercules-390.org/

This is Hercules, an emulator for old mainframes. They also have COBOL and other important languages like JCL, the job control language.

Here the "turnkey" distribution that installs everything for you: https://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/

A mainframe community from youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/moshix

Have fun.

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If you are starting from zero COBOL experience, a mainframe environment may be too big of a learning curve.

Maybe start small. There were COBOL implementations for pretty much every 8-bit computer in the 80's. Think Commodore 64, Apple ][, or whatever emulated environment works for you.

Because they were designed for complete beginners, they often came with very detailed, very easy to comprehend manuals. Many of which are available as PDFs online today. And there was no end of third-party books to help you along, which may be available from Biblio, or whatever your favorite used book source is.

Getting a feel for COBOL from these baby steps can help you decide if you want to advance into full big iron COBOL development.

This also applies to FORTRAN, APL, and other older languages.

> a mainframe environment may be too big of a learning curve

Yeah, "curve" might be a little generous here. It's more like a cliff from what limited I remember of my short lived mainframe stint.

In my experience, a cliff is exactly what makes you learn fast and deep.

Start from nothing, and make tiny baby steps. Target a short term milestone. Learn how to use the documentation. Even if you start slower than people who take shortcuts,you end up being faster because you have a much deeper undestanding

An Apple II emulator, such as AppleWin (free, Windows) or Virtual][ ($, MacOS), that supports the Microsoft SoftCard will let you run CP/M software. Microsoft's COBOL compiler is easily available from various Apple and CP/M archives. CP/M itself is a little bit of a learning curve, but at least most everything is free, depending on your platform. There are probably Linux options as well for Apple emulation.

If you want to use CP/M on macOS, you can skip the Apple ][ emulation, and go straight to Thomas Harte's program CP/M for OS X.

I've never been able to figure out how to open a file by passing the filename as an argument to the program you're opening. Apparently there's no ccp.com available. It's fine if you're using WordStar, which lets you view the files in the current directory; impossible if you don't have a menu interface to open a file.

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