COBOL Development Detailed Timeline Overview

COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) has evolved from a 1959 “stopgap” experiment into a cornerstone of global finance, currently powering approximately 95% of ATM swipes and 80% of in-person credit card transactions. 

The Early Years (1959–1965)

  • 1959 (Origins): Following a meeting at the Pentagon in May, the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) was formed to create a machine-independent language for business. It was heavily influenced by Grace Hopper’s FLOW-MATIC.
  • 1960 (First Release): The COBOL-60 specifications were published. In December, the same program was successfully run on two different manufacturers’ computers (RCA and Univac), proving portability.
  • 1961–1965 (Rapid Revisions): Successive updates included COBOL-61 and COBOL-65, which introduced critical features like the SORT and REPORT WRITER facilities. 

Standardisation & Dominance (1968–1985) 

  • 1968 (COBOL-68): The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) published the first official standard, making COBOL the industry benchmark.
  • 1974 (COBOL-74): This update added file organisation methods and the DELETE statement, further refining data management capabilities.
  • 1985 (COBOL-85): A major milestone that introduced structured programming (e.g., END-IF, EVALUATE) to improve code readability and maintainability. 

Modernisation & Object-Orientation (2002–Present) 

  • 2000 (The Y2K Crisis): COBOL regained global attention as programmers rushed to fix the “Millennium Bug” in legacy systems.
  • 2002 (COBOL-2002): The first major update in 17 years introduced Object-Oriented (OO) features, Unicode support, and XML processing.
  • 2014 (COBOL-2014): Simplified the language by making several niche features (like the SCREEN SECTION) optional and adopting IEEE 754 floating-point math.
  • 2023 (COBOL-2023): The current ISO/IEC 1989:2023 standard added modern programming comforts like asynchronous messaging (SEND/RECEIVE), transaction processing (COMMIT/ROLLBACK), and bitwise operators. 

Today, despite its age, an estimated 800 billion lines of COBOL remain in active use, with modernization efforts focusing on cloud integration and interoperability with Java and .NET.

COBOL Development Detailed Timeline Overview

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Author: Mark Whitfield

Welcome to my site! After graduating in Computing in 1990, I accepted a position as a programmer at a Runcorn based software house specialising in electronic banking software, namely sp/ARCHITECT-BANK on Tandem Computers (now HPE NonStop). This was before the internet became more prevalent and so the notion of enabling desktop access to company accounts for inter-account transfers and book keeping was still quite a cutting edge idea (and smartphones only ever hinted at in Space 1999). The company was called The Software Partnership (which was taken over by Deluxe Data in 1994). I spent 5 years in Runcorn developing code for SP/ARCHITECT for various banks like TSB, Bank of Scotland, Rabobank and Girofon (Denmark) to name but a few. I then moved onto a software house in Salford Quays for further bank facing projects. After a further 23 years in the IT industry and now a Senior IT Project Manager (both Agile and Waterfall delivery), I thought I would echo out my Career Profile in this corner of the internet for quick and easy access.

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