COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) is a programming language designed for business data processing such as payroll, accounting, inventory, and records management. It was created by CODASYL, the Conference on Data Systems Languages, a committee that brought together computer makers, US government agencies, and users to define a single common language that could run across different manufacturers’ machines.
The committee’s work was published in 1960 in the CODASYL COBOL report, a scanned copy of which survives in the bitsavers collection as the “COBOL Report Apr60.” That document is the early specification that defined the language’s structure and statements for the first generation of COBOL implementations.
A defining feature of COBOL is its English-like style: programs are written with verbose, readable statements that resemble plain instructions rather than dense mathematical notation. This reflected the goal of making business programs easier for a wide range of staff to read and maintain, an idea closely tied to Grace Hopper’s earlier work on FLOW-MATIC.
COBOL went on to become one of the most widely deployed languages in history, and large amounts of COBOL code still run in banking, insurance, and government systems decades after the original 1960 report.