COBOL HISTORY













COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was one of the earliest high-level 
programming languages.

COBOL was developed in 1959 by the Conference on Data Systems Languages 
(CODASYL). This committee was a formed by a joint effort of industry, major 
universities, and the United States Government. 


Government printing office, has printed the COBOL specifications as Cobol60 in 
1960. COBOL was developed within a six month period, and yet is still in use 
over 40 years later.


Since 1960, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) was responsible 
for developing new COBOL standards.



Legacy 

COBOL programs are in use globally in governmental and military agencies, in 
commercial enterprises. 95% financial and insurance business is on COBOL in US 

In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL 
with over 200 billion lines of code in existence and with an estimated 5 billion 
lines of new code annually.