I have been interested in learning COBOl and mainframes for a couple of months now, but I’ve been stymied by the difficulty of setting up a good mainframe emulator. The Hercules mainframe emulator has a lot of conflicting install instructions (and the top search result was last updated in 2010); so I was excited when the global pandemic highlighted the need for engineers who understood these systems. In the past month IBM has started the Open Mainframe Project with the intent of filling the skills gap for mainframes.