Y2K

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nteresting piece of history: COBOL was the first programming language mandated by the Department of Defense for its applications - i.e., DOD software had to be in COBOL. It is interesting to note that, decades later, DOD dropped COBOL and switched to Ada, yet another DOD sponsored language, and then dropped Ada a few years back.
The first version of COBOL was called COBOL-60. COBOL standards were revised in 1961 (COBOL-61), in 1963 (COBOL-61 Extended), and in 1965 (COBOL-65). In 1968, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a standard COBOL, known as American National Standards Institute (ANSI) COBOL in order was to overcome incompatibilities of different versions of the "standards" being developed and marketed by various vendors at the time. Vendors added "proprietary extensions" that made their COBOL in compatible with other vendors' COBOL. In 1970, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted the ANSI standard COBOL.ANSI published adopted major revisions in COBOL in 1974, 1985 and 1997.
Object-oriented COBOL is a subset of COBOL 97, which is the fourth edition in the continuing evolution of ANSI/ISO standard COBOL. COBOL 97 includes conventional improvements as well as object-oriented features. Today several object-oriented COBOL compilers are available on the market - Fujitsu, IBM and MicroFocus among them. The next-generation standard, COBOL 2002, is just around the corner.
Thanks to Adm. Hopper, COBOL became the first widely-used high-level programming language for business applications. Countless business applications programs - for inventory, payroll, accounting, retail, and so on - have been developed in COBOL since the 1960s and many of these programs are still in use today, and it is most likely that they will be around for most of this century and perhaps, beyond.
The first COBOL class I taught was in the mid-1970s at the Muskingham Area Technical College in Ohio. It was COBOL-6...