COBOL is a business-orientated programming language that has been in use since 1959, making it one of the world's oldest programming languages.

Despite being much criticised (and for good reasons) it is still a major programming language in the financial sector, although there are a declining number of experienced programmers.

In the early 2000s a free implementation of COBOL was developed by Keisuke Nishida and Roger While. This project was gradually transitioned to the Free Software Foundation and on June 17th, 2005, OpenCOBOL became GnuCOBOL. With strong C integration, GnuCOBOL has a high level of compliance with modern standards of the language.

This hands-on presentation and tutorial will include some of the history of the language, why it is (surprisingly) still important, and plenty of examples to begin the journal into GnuCOBOL.

GnuCOBOL: A Gnu Life for an Old Workhorse. Presentation to Linux Users of Victoria, 16th July, 2016. Command summary also available.