A history of COBOL - Slideshare Edition.pptx
- 2. How it started… • Designed by committee in 1959 – an original ‘open’ project • … to support the processing of data in business • Defined as needing to be English-like so it was easy to learn and understand • Defined as needing to produce the same results across any machinery This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY
- 3. Invented by women, for women • Grace Hopper • Jean Sammet • Mary Hawes • A generation of female COBOL programmers in the 1960s
- 4. IBM Z/OS RedHat Data General OS/2 Texas Instruments SCO UNIX SVR4 Intel Solaris Silicon Graphics TEC Sparc Solaris Matsushita Siemens SNI HP/UX AWS Ubuntu MS DOS .NET Toshiba Hitachi Fujitsu NEC PA-RISC Azure Bull GCOS Linux on Z Canon Sequent DEC Alpha Tru64 Amdahl JVM SUSE AS/400 AIX Windows 10 OSF/1 WinNT COBOL became ubiquitous … NT on Alpha Mitsubishi Windows 3.1 ICL VME SCO UNIXWARE PFU Win95 Omron AT&T olivetti Compaq Panasonic
- 5. … and remained easy to learn 5 “COBOL IS ONE OF THE FEW LANGUAGES WRITTEN IN THE LAST 50 YEARS THAT’S READABLE AND UNDERSTANDABLE.” “IT’S NOT JUST A WRITE-ONLY LANGUAGE, YOU CAN COME BACK YEARS LATER AND UNDERSTAND THE CODE.” “IF YOU CAN WORK WITH ECLIPSE, JAVA, VISUAL STUDIO AND C# YOU CAN MASTER COBOL IN A MATTER OF HOURS.” “ANY DEVELOPER WORTH THEIR SALT IN ANY OTHER LANGUAGE ANYWHERE COULD LEARN ENOUGH COBOL IN A WEEK TO MAINTAIN CODE.”
- 6. … and very successful • Tens of thousands of applications and hundreds of billions of lines of production code • COBOL supports banking, insurance, transportation, government, retail, healthcare and many other sectors • COBOL remains overwhelmingly strategic, with 92% response rate from the marketplace in 2020
- 7. Scientific vs Business vs Academic languages …but not cool enough COBOL came from commerce, not academia. There was no intellectual challenge in learning it. Which meant it was never widely taught, or well regarded by computing graduates.
- 8. 1970 2020 2019 Y2K Concerns over Y2K and advent of client/server and mid-range technology created public debate of COBOL’s long- term suitability 2000 COBOL’s 60th anniversary widely recognized and positively reported – although most references are to its age and dwindling value 2019 Misinformation about COBOL and COVID Activists start the OMP COBOL Working Group 2020 COBOL’s commercial suitability made it a de-facto standard for business systems 1960s-70s …which eroded its reputation
- 9. … But a new voice for COBOL emerged …For COBOL exponents everywhere.
- 10. The COBOL Working Group objectives – tell the world the truth about COBOL Step 1. OMP 2021 COBOL Market Survey: • Understand the size of the COBOL Market • Identify issues and concerns • Identify how organizations are addressing the issues
- 11. COBOL Prevalence • 250 Billion lines of COBOL code in production (based on OMP survey responses and subsequent extrapolation) • Industries with greatest reliance on COBOL include Financial Services, Government, Software, Logistics, Retail, Manufacturing, Other 15.60% 27.66% 36.17% 13.48% 7.09% Number of COBOL lines Vs. Financial Services Industry < 1M 1-10M >10M to 100M >100M to 1B > 1B Survey Results:
- 12. COBOL Continuance 58% say they expect COBOL applications to remain in place for at least five years 55% in Financial Services expect COBOL applications to remain in place for at least ten years 5.67% 18.44% 20.57% 55.32% Expected Continuance Vs. Financial Services Industry < 2 yrs 2-5yrs 6-10yrs >10yrs Survey Results:
- 13. More market data… • Established Market Research agency Vanson Bourne ran a wider survey, across hundreds of respondents from 40 countries. • They found even more COBOL out there – 800Bn lines • Over half have COBOL on 2 major platforms (not just the mainframe) • 92% of respondents say that their organization’s COBOL applications are strategic.
- 14. COBOL – ready for tomorrow Ongoing vendor investments mean COBOL supports / works with – • IMS, VSAM, DB2, IDMS, Datacom, Oracle, SQLServer, PostgreSQL… • z/OS, Linux (SLES, RHEL, Ubuntu et al.), AIX, OS/400, Windows, Solaris, HP/UX, Unixware… • AWS, Azure, GCP, .NET, JVM, VMWare, Docker, Kubernetes… • Microservices, OO, API, SOA, Web Services… • Visual Studio, VSCode, Eclipse, Che…
- 15. COBOL - for the next generation • • • • This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
- 16. Learn More Live delivery of this presentation at the Open Mainframe Summit (Sept 2022) • https://youtu.be/guZe2qq98f0 Open Mainframe Project Survey • Special Report: COBOL Survey Results Prove Pervasiveness, Value and a Bright Future | TechChannel • Derek Britton on the Language and Application of COBOL | TechChannel Unconscious Bias in Tech • IT’s Fixed View Needs Fixing | Micro Focus Blog Micro Focus Survey • How much COBOL is really out there? (brighttalk.com) COBOL 60th Anniversary White Paper • COBOL at 60 – a living legend
Editor's Notes
- #13: Derek AND… Critically, and with an eye on the future, we also asked about likely continued usage of these applications. Is this carrying on? We asked a few questions around this, but a key data point here is that well over half of all the responses across all sectors are saying the applications are here to stay. Either 6-10 years or more usually over a decade. Huge strategic future reliance on COBOL is the answer in the majority of cases. Again here you can see the Financial Services breakdown, which I think illustrates the future importance of COBOL very well, where that lifespan was even longer in most cases.