COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was developed in the late 1950s and remains a widely used programming language, used by organizations worldwide for mission-critical applications. Looking back on how COBOL emerged for two main business needs: to develop a programming language that is more accessible to non-technical resources and to allow users of the program to use it on a variety of computers without having to substantially rewrite the program for each system. COBOL is built to look just like the English language, making it easier to learn and transfer between computers.
Few interesting facts about COBOL-
- There are 200 billion lines of COBOL code
- About 95 percent of ATM swipes use COBOL code
- COBOL systems handle $3 trillion in commerce
For a few years now, a myth stating that the mainframes and COBOL are dead has been in the news, but the reality is that the program that is currently in use may be more than 30 years old, but there is a significant development in the underlying technologies. Today’s mainframes run at a higher clock speed and a larger number of processors than the servers coming in from the x86 world.
COBOL became the primary way to build large business systems in the 1960s to 1980s, and those systems are currently running. Even today, the Mainframes and COBOL are running and adapted to serve business purposes; hence, the major leading banks and retailers use Mainframes, COBOL, CICS, and IMS. A transaction may start on a web browser running on code written in JavaScript or .NET, but it almost always ends on a CICS or IMS back end running COBOL.
The underlying hardware might change, but the software will continue to run as it has for decades due to the continued commitment to compatibility by IBM and many others in the mainframe ecosystem.
Scott Fagen, the Chief Products Officer at 21st Century Software, provides more informative insights about the world of COBOL in his interview for Enterprise Tech Journal.