It certainly wasn't like Pascal in 1969, given that the first release of that language was in 1970.
If it's 1969, and you didn't happen to have heard of ALGOL, what you know is COBOL, FORTRAN, Assembly, and maybe BASIC: then yeah, PL/I looks like a more modern version of COBOL.
If it's 1969, and you didn't happen to have heard of ALGOL, what you know is COBOL, FORTRAN, Assembly, and maybe BASIC: then yeah, PL/I looks like a more modern version of COBOL.