COBOL celebrates its 50th birthday

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Micro Focus, provider of enterprise application management and modernisation solutions, today launched a research which reveals the extent to which COBOL (which stands for Common Business-Oriented Language), a computer language invented 50 years ago, continues to support our everyday lives.

Micro Focus commissioned the research to coincide with COBOL’s 50th birthday. 28 May 1959 marks 50 years since the Short Range Committee was established at a meeting at the Pentagon. Chaired by Joseph Wegstein of the US National Bureau of Standards, it was the Short Range Committee that would soon create the very first description of COBOL, thus marking the birth of a language that defined the computing era.

The research found that despite its age, COBOL plays a pivotal role in running most of the world’s businesses and public services.

According to analyst estimates, 60-80 percent of the world’s enterprises still rely on COBOL to run their business.

Ashish Masand, country manager, Micro Focus India said, “There is understood to be over 200 billion lines of COBOL code in existence, with hundreds more being created every single day and the language supports over 30 billion transactions per day, many of which impact our lives every day.”

The research conducted by Micro Focus in the UK with 1,993 adults found that people interact with COBOL at least ten times throughout the course of an average working day. Yet, despite using the technology so often, only 18 percent of those surveyed had ever actually heard of COBOL.

Additionally, equivalent research conducted by Micro Focus in the US showed the average American relies on COBOL at least 13 times per day.

Further he noted: “COBOL emerged at the very birth of the computer industry, yet despite the attempts made by numerous other languages’ to steal its crown, none have proved to be as well-suited to their tasks as COBOL. It predates the microprocessor by a whole decade (1969), and was already running the bulk of the world’s biggest businesses before the likes of Microsoft (1975), Apple (1976) and Oracle (1977) had even been established."

"The founders of Google, arguably the most pervasive of modern technologies, were mere toddlers at this time, yet COBOL’s robustness, core performance and ability to adapt to newer technologies means there are still 200 times more COBOL transactions every day than searches on Google itself,” added Ashish.

Jan Stuart, a COBOL programmer since 1978 believes strongly in COBOL’s future, “COBOL is just a great language for business and it isn't going away. It has kept me in steady employment for many decades, but despite retiring, I’m in as much demand as ever.”

Alan Rodger, senior research analyst at Butler Group (a Datamonitor company) compares COBOL’s heritage with that of the internal combustion engine, “COBOL can be thought of as IT’s equivalent to the ubiquitous power source of automobiles, both technologies enabled the human population to benefit in many ways from new possibilities'. 

He continued, “COBOL has been the prevalent language for developing business applications throughout the greater part of five decades. Systems and applications written in COBOL remain in widespread use within the vertical sectors that spend some of the world’s largest IT budgets, such as Finance, Government, Manufacturing, and Telecoms, as well as numerous others.”