Celebrating 65 Years of COBOL
September is a special month for the mainframe community as we celebrate the birthday of COBOL, a programming language that has stood the test of time and continues to power critical systems around the world. To mark this occasion, Planet Mainframe is inviting our community members to share their thoughts, experiences, and insights about COBOL.
Information Technology: IT’s Key Ingredients
The COBOL programming language – which stands for Common Business Oriented Language – began life in 1959, with its first release a year later.
In the 65 years since, the world of IT has largely overlooked or downplayed its continued success as a technology instrument, and COBOL has—with a couple of notable exceptions—stayed out of the limelight. That lack of attention might have caused other problems, as we will explore, but the fact remains that vast swathes of the global economy still run on COBOL.
The Many Charms of COBOL
During my studies in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), also known as East Germany, I immersed myself in the world of programming languages. My first companions on this journey were PL/1 and the ubiquitous assembler ASM370.
Why these two? Well, the IBM-compatible mainframes produced in the GDR often had as much memory as a modern pocket calculator – almost nothing! So, we had to work with what we had, and that meant that we had to use particularly efficient and memory-saving programming languages.
Legacy IT, COBOL, and the Art of Aircraft Maintenance
What I wish everyone understood about COBOL
