Features

Old language, new hands

COBOL is now entering its sixth decade of use, and remains as relevant as ever.

10 May 2021

It was way back in 1959 when COBOL first flickered into being. Standing for COmmon Business- Oriented Language, it was the fruits of an effort to develop a standard language that could be used on computers from different manufacturers, which in those days were room-sized affairs. One of these was called the Universal Automatic Computer (or UNIVAC), which used a language called FLOW-MATIC developed by the famous programmer Grace Murray Hopper. She was also responsible for building the world’s first compiler, or the program that translates the language into machine code. Until then, computers had only been used for arithmetic. Hopper won dozens of awards and honorary doctorates for her pioneering work (including the inaugural Computer Science Man of the Year in 1969), but it was only in the year before her death in 1992 that she was honoured with the National Medal of Technology by US president George Bush. Hopper, and others, built COBOL on the foundations of FLOWMATIC, which can be vaguely understood even by those without programming knowledge because of its English-like syntax.

Sounding the alarm

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