No, I never learned COBOL. I learn some programming from him when I was like 7 or 8, some language one would never have heard of called FOCAL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(programming_language) which was ripped off from DEC by the soviets for their little BK-0010
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/BK0010 and which I mostly used to play games loaded from tapes. Mostly I just really liked computers, just like him. He didn't stick with mainframe programming after the Y2K passed, I think he could have continued but he was bored...