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COBOL: A 1959 Idea and 2022 Technology

COBOL, the unassuming technology that has been around since before IT was even a term, is sometimes the subject of a heated state government debate, occasionally makes headlines at industry events, and it was even featured among the top 10 technology topics on an IEEE Twitter poll from 2020. But how did it become a part of the modern zeitgeist? 

COBOL is now into its seventh decade of usage as a global programming language and continues to be hugely important as a system language for great swaths of the global economy. Age aside, COBOL’s defining characteristics include running systems of record applications in worldwide organizations; supporting all sectors vital to the global economy including banking, transportation, government, and healthcare; comprising billions of lines of application code worldwide; and remaining ubiquitous in the mainframe world.

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The Genius of Babbage’s Analytical Engine

In the early 1800s, a ship’s navigator used a sextant to measure sightlines to the Sun, Moon, and other celestial bodies and, with the assistance of nautical tables, computed the ship’s position. Unfortunately, the numerical values in the tables had been prepared using the finest technology available at the time, which consisted of humans working through tedious calculations by hand. Because of this, the tables were riddled with errors, which could easily lead to catastrophe for a ship at sea.

In 1820, Charles Babbage, as a founding member of the Astronomical Society of London, undertook to improve the accuracy of nautical tables. Babbage came to believe it would be possible to construct a machine capable of computing the numeric values for the tables and printing the results. His proposal to develop a machine called the Difference Engine for this purpose led to an effort that terminated after ten years without producing a working apparatus.