History
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In 1952, Grace Murray Hopper began a
journey that would eventually lead to the language we know as COBOL.
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She began by
developing a series of programming languages that became more and more like natural
language. The language used phrases to express the operations of business data processing. FLOWMATIC was the result of this evolutionary journey.
Through the 1950's, other computing leaders were also working through the
challenge of creating a practical business language. IBM had produced a language
named COMMERCIAL TRANSLATOR.
In 1959, an industry-wide team was assembled to formulate a
common business programming language. The Conference on Data System Languages
(CODASYL) led by Joe Wegstein of National Bureau of Standards (now National Institute
of Standards and Technology) developed a new language, and
created the first standardized business computer programming language.
COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was
developed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Defense in cooperation with
computer manufactures, users and universities. The initial specifications for COBOL were
presented in a report of the executive committee of CODASYL committee in April of 1960.
It was designed to be a business problem oriented, machine independent and capable
of continuous change and development.
Since 1960,COBOL has undergone considerable updates
and improvements. It has emerged as the leading data processing language in the
business world. The standard language specification has three levels low,
middle and high so that standard COBOL can be implemented on computers of varying sizes.
Despite the attempts at standardization, variations in
COBOL implementations continue to exist. Most deviations or "extensions" are
intended to take advantage of hardware or environmental features which were not defined in
the standard definition.
| 1968 -- American National
Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a standard form of the language known as
American National Standard (ANSI) COBOL. This was an attempt to overcome the
incompatibilities of the different versions of COBOL. 1974 -- ANSI published a revised
version of (ANSI) COBOL
1985 -- ANSI published another
revised version
Today -- ISO and ANSI committees have
completed the features of the latest revision of COBOL 2002.
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