How Much Do You Know About COBOL?

Aug 1, 2023

Sonja Soderlund is an Oregon-based B2B freelance writer. Whether writing about mainframe computers, educational technology, or sustainable retail, she strives to bring clarity to complex issues. Connect with her or LinkedIn.

Whether you love it or hate it, COBOL has been around for a long time, its impact lingering even as its popularity wanes. Created by committee way back in the middle of the last century, COBOL was one of the first high-level computer languages and the business community’s most used computer language for decades. 
COBOL apologists praise it for its simple, explicit syntax, while one of its detractors famously lambasted it for “crippling the mind.” Wherever you fall on this spectrum, if you’re involved with mainframes, you’re going to encounter COBOL. Take our quiz to see how well you know your COBOL trivia!

Here’s this week’s Trivia Challenge:

1. What does COBOL stand for?

 
 
 
 

2. COBOL was partly based on which programming language:

 
 
 
 

3. Which organization was most closely associated with the creation of COBOL?

 
 
 
 

4. In what year was COBOL first introduced?

 
 
 
 

5. Which of these names is associated with the creation of COBOL?

 
 
 
 

6. Which of these were considered as a name for the new language eventually called COBOL?

 
 
 
 
 

7. What percentage of in-person banking transactions are built on COBOL?

 
 
 
 

8. What percentage of ATM banking transactions rely on COBOL?

 
 
 
 

9. COBOL is used to run unemployment insurance programs in how many states?

 
 
 
 

10. Today’s IBM mainframe COBOL now supports JAVA, JSON and XML

 
 

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