https://www.zdnet.com/article/cobol-turns-60-why-it-will-outlive-us-all/
"The credit for coming up with the basic idea goes not to Grace Hopper,
although she contributed to the language and promoted it, but to Mary
Hawes. She was a Burroughs Corporation programmer who saw a need for a
computer language. In March 1959, Hawes proposed that a new computer
language be created. It would have an English-like vocabulary that could
be used across different computers to perform basic business tasks."
In secondary school I studied COBOL, FORTRAN and BASIC which we could
execute on our PDP-8 and LSI-11 machines. Then along came the first
microcomputers and I started learning 6502 and Z80 assembly and FORTH,
then eventually PASCAL, x86 assembly and C. After leaving school I spent
my career as a software developer using C and Perl, then Ruby, and now
finally Python and JavaScript, though I have also had to do a little bit
of PHP and Java at times. Perhaps Rust and Go are still in my future. I
do still see positions advertised for COBOL programmers from time to time.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
