In 1959 a group of computer manufacturers, US government agencies, and users formed the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) to address a costly problem: every machine had its own incompatible programming languages, so business programs could not move between systems. The committee set out to define a single common business-oriented language.
The result of that effort was the COBOL specification, prepared by the committee and published in 1960. A scanned copy of the report survives in the bitsavers collection as the “COBOL Report Apr60,” documenting the data structures and English-like statements that made up the first version of the language, COBOL-60.
This was a milestone because it established a portable, vendor-neutral language aimed squarely at business data processing rather than scientific calculation. The CODASYL model of a shared committee specification, rather than a single company’s product, also set an early pattern for how programming languages would later be standardized.
Grace Hopper’s earlier work on English-language compilers, especially FLOW-MATIC, was a direct influence on the design that CODASYL adopted, linking the 1960 specification back to the first generation of compiler pioneers.