Hello there and welcome to your introduction to COBOL. No matter what brought you here, we're glad to see you and hope that you enjoy all that went into creating these videos. First things first. What is COBOL? Well, whenever there's an acronym I like to start there. And COBOL is an acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language. That's a big tell right there right in the name. This is a business language. Compared with other more general purpose languages, COBOL was designed around data processing, specifically data processing with incredibly high accuracy, extreme efficiency and ease of reading and writing. COBOL has indeed been around for over 60 years as of this recording and surprise surprise, the fundamentals of business being able to process very large amounts of data accurately and efficiently continue to be important. So, all of the transactions that happen when you're a credit card, visiting a store or doing pretty much anything with a bank there's a good chance some COBOL code got executed somewhere in there. In fact, every day about $3 trillion in finance gets handled by COBOL. So let's just make sure we're clear here. COBOL pretty much runs the world. It has been kept up to date to support new requirements throughout the years and 1.5 billion lines of new code are written every year. Suffice to say, learning this language will give you a very valuable set of skills. In this course, you're going to be working with Enterprise COBOL, which is an implementation written specifically to run on IBM Z mainframes. The banks, insurance agencies, energy companies, retail chains that depend on COBOL to run their extremely important transactions. Guess what, a whole lot of them also depend on IBM Z mainframes to ensure their applications can keep up with the demand 24 by 7. Learning Enterprise COBOL says, I want to work on the most important code running on the most important systems, running the types of things that no exaggeration at all the world depends on. That's a pretty bold statement, and I have no problem at all saying it because it's the truth. [MUSIC]