Common Oriented Business Language (COBOL) grew from FLOW-MATIC which was designed by Grace Hopper. Named COBOL on September 18, 1959, it’s 50th anniversary will be celebrated with a world-wide party hosted by COBOL Magazine on September 18, 2009 (www.cobolmagazine.com). As a programmer since the 1960’s I have worked in COBOL for more than 40 years and had the good fortune to work on projects with Hopper. Today I continue to program in COBOL, write dialogue conversion tools and publish COBOL Magazine, a monthly on-line and print magazine that premiered January 2009. The Anita Borg Institute has joined the magazine as a monthly contributor.
COBOL remains an essential language because it is business oriented, rather than technology oriented. Based in English, it was designed to write business applications such as payroll, inventory control, and order processing. Industries still reliant on COBOL include banking, insurance, and manufacturing. There are 180 billion lines of COBOL code in use today and a tremendous demand for COBOL programmers.
What’s wonderful about COBOL? It’s English. It’s pretty much self-documenting and easy to understand. COBOL is transportable and was the first language that was compiled on two different machines and ran the same way.
Early Days
While searching for a job in 1968, I found an ad for someone to change tapes on a computer. This sounded great to me, although I didn’t know what a computer was. At the interview I met Dr. Roland Holt (bow tie and all) at Little, Brown & Co. Dr. Holt rented computer time from Little, Brown to process orders for his wholesale book business. We negotiated a deal and he agreed to teach me how to program computers in Assembler and COBOL. I found COBOL to be much easier and have been programming computers ever since.
One of the first computers I used was a Honeywell 200. This metal monster was approximately 25 feet long, five feet deep, and more than four feet high. It required magnetic tape, 80 column punch cards, and a huge drum printer. When there was a read error, operators frequently skipped past the bad part on the tape with obviously unpredictable results. A tension spring held the cards in place and would occasionally break, flinging cards throughout the room. My hand held calculator has more power than those early computers, and is more reliable.
Hopper
Grace Hopper was one of several dynamic and interesting people who added to my knowledge of programming. We worked on several projects for Digital Equipment. Hopper was a true computer geek, focused and straightforward. Her technical knowledge was brilliant and she had a huge sense of humor. Hopper is the first person I heard say, “It’s easier to apologize afterwards than ask for permission and be turned down.” She was innovative and did what was necessary to get the job done.
A teacher in the best sense of that word, Grace traveled with lengths of wire to demonstrate the size of nanoseconds and milliseconds. Traveling in uniform in her 80’s, a security person asked her, “What are you supposed to be?” She responded, “I’m a rear admiral, what are you supposed to be?” The interview that Grace did with David Lettermen, which can be seen on our website, is a terrific snapshot of her personality. She was bright, direct and a bit sassy.
My COBOL History
At Tufts Medical Center the company I worked for rented time on the machines to run payroll for nursing homes from midnight to 8am. These Univac file machines ran so hot we put our TV dinners in the back when we arrived and when it was time to eat lunch they were nice and warm.
The Burroughs computers had smaller cabinets, used magnetic tapes and had disc drives. I remember thinking how wonderful it was to have a disc cartridge with 1.2 mb of disc storage. Later we had the first mini-computers, including Tandy Radio Shack with large 8” floppy discs. These had 1,200 k of memory. Recently, I purchased a jump drive with 16 gig of memory for $59.
When I was working on the Honeywell machines my good friend, George Trudeau, and I had a project at William Carter Company. They had lost the source code to the Assembler programs and all they had was the binary. We worked night and day and wrote a program to recover the source code from the binaries. We worked our usual night shift, went out for breakfast to the IHOP in Needham Heights and stayed there through lunch and dinner, working on the logic to the conversion tool, then returned to our night shift. We produced the first and only translation program to convert binary programs back to source code.
In the early 80’s I got involved in projects with Digital Equipment. They needed a language that could read a document and convert text files to speech. I designed a language called FlexTalk, for which the interpreter was written in COBOL. DECtalk is the hardware that used the FlexTalk program to produce speech. My language was used for self-running demos for the DEC series of computers sold in their retail stores. In the movie “Short Circuit” DECtalk was used for several of the robots. Steven Hawking used DECtalk when he lost his ability to speak.
COBOL Planet
My dedication to COBOL inspired me to develop COBOL Planet. For years I have searched for products and resources for COBOL programmers and companies that rely on COBOL. This information has been difficult to find. At www.CobolPlanet.com a constellation of goods and services gather. COBOL Planet will be a comprehensive resource for companies and programmers to use this flexible and evolving language.
COBOL is as flexible and user-friendly as it was 50 years ago when Grace Hopper was known as the “Mother of COBOL.” More than 75% of mainframes continue to rely on COBOL. Today’s COBOL compilers offer a workable array of capabilities for web interaction, .net and data base connectivity. I continue to work in COBOL and encourage a new generation of users and programmers to learn this business oriented tool.
[Frank Gauthier is publisher of the new COBOL Magazine and CEO of The COBOL Group, a migration service specialty firm focused on legacy COBOL migrations.]