[protomyth]

In the late 80's, my academic advisor said he wouldn't sign off on me taking a COBOL class because that was a business department IT class and would not go with the rest of my studies[1]. I wasn't really into the idea anyway and filled my schedule with other classes. I do wonder what other CompSci departments at the time were doing.

1) EE was the sole teacher of FORTRAN and I decided against that also, more from a teacher problem than a lack of desire to learn FORTRAN which I later did (without the all caps).

[flukus]

Why the business department? Were they still under the illusion that COBOL would allow business types to write their own code?

[babuskov]

We had it too (I went to a mixed IT-business university). I think the idea was to get some perspective on what COBOL is, so if you're managing a company one day and IT people you hire tell you that something is hard to do, or takes too much time because the system is in COBOL, you know what they're talking about and don't think that they're just messing with you.

[protomyth]

You know, I really didn't know then or now. The Business school taught COBOL and RPG on, I do believe, an AS/400 they owned separate from the rest of the computer infrastructure. I might be remembering wrong, but I was pretty sure that was the story[1]. I think it was something to do with the information systems degree requirements.

1) my Dad did IT on an AS/400, I still hear "wand in" instead of login.

[edit] looks like the new requirements are a bit more inline with today's world http://business.und.edu/undergraduate/school-of-entrepreneur...