COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.
The COBOL 2002 standard includes support for object-oriented programming and other modern language features.
The COBOL specification was created by a committee of
researchers from private industry, universities, and government during
the second half of 1959. The specifications were to a great extent
inspired by the FLOW-MATIC language invented by Grace Hopper - commonly
referred to as "the mother of the COBOL language." The IBM COMTRAN
language invented by Bob Bemer was also drawn upon, but the FACT
language specification from Honeywell was not distributed to committee
members until late in the process and had relatively little impact.
FLOW-MATIC's status as the only language of the bunch to have actually
been implemented made it particularly attractive to the committee.
The scene was set on April 8, 1959 at a meeting of computer
manufacturers, users, and university people at the University of
Pennsylvania Computing Center. The United States Department of Defense
subsequently agreed to sponsor and oversee the next activities. A
meeting chaired by Charles A. Phillips was held at the Pentagon on May
28 and 29 of 1959 (exactly one year after the Zürich ALGOL 58 meeting);
there it was decided to set up three committees: short, intermediate
and long range (the last one was never actually formed). It was the
Short Range Committee, chaired by Joseph Wegstein of the US National
Bureau of Standards, that during the following months created a
description of the first version of COBOL.
The committee was formed to recommend a short range approach to a
common business language. The committee was made up of members
representing six computer manufacturers and three government agencies.
The six computer manufacturers were Burroughs Corporation, IBM,
Minneapolis-Honeywell (Honeywell Labs), RCA, Sperry Rand, and Sylvania
Electric Products. The three government agencies were the US Air Force,
the Navy's David Taylor Model Basin, and the National Bureau of
Standards (now National Institute of Standards and Technology). The
intermediate-range committee was formed but never became operational.
In the end a sub-committee of the Short Range Committee developed the
specifications of the COBOL language. This sub-committee was made up of
six individuals:
- William Selden and Gertrude Tierney of IBM
- Howard Bromberg and Howard Discount of RCA
- Vernon Reeves and Jean E. Sammet of Sylvania Electric Products
The decision to use the name "COBOL" was made at a meeting of the
committee held on 18 September 1959. The subcommittee completed the
specifications for COBOL in December 1959.
The first compilers for COBOL were subsequently implemented in 1960,
and on December 6 and 7, essentially the same COBOL program ran on two
different computer makes, an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac
computer, demonstrating that compatibility could be achieved.
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