COBOL (1959)
With Fortran targeting engineering and science, there was a clear need for a language suited to business problems — accounting, logistics, and manufacturing. Two companies put their efforts toward this in 1959: Sperry Rand's UNIVAC division with Flow-Matic, and IBM beginning work on Comtran (Commercial Translator).
The Collective Approach
Mary Hawes of Burroughs proposed a collective standard. She, along with Grace Hopper and others, approached the Pentagon's Charles Philips to lead a collective undertaking. In late May, broad guidelines were drawn, the most important being "maximum use of Simple English."
A short-range committee was formed including executives from U.S. Steel, DuPont, and Esso, along with advisors Grace Hopper of Sperry Rand, Robert Bemer of IBM, and Jean Sammett. They were assigned to design the new language within three months.
The "Common" Language
The committee blended three existing projects: Sperry Rand's Flow-Matic, IBM's Comtran, and the Air Force's Aimco. At a September 17 meeting, Bemer suggested COBOL — Grace Hopper said "OK, sounds good to me." The next day it was agreed upon as a contraction of COmmon Business Oriented Language.
After stretching the deadline to six months, the committee presented a technical specification in December 1959. COBOL introduced a "picture clause" for describing data in hierarchical tables, contributing to the later development of database technology.
MULTIPLY HOURLY-RATE BY HOURS-WORKED GIVING GROSS-PAYCOBOL fell short of its promise of "programming in English" — professional programmers soon adopted mnemonic abbreviations. But from the outset, the U.S. Department of Defense announced it would not buy or lease computers unless they ran COBOL, cementing its adoption.
"Cobol did hierarchical data layouts very well, and that wasn't even a gleam in the eye for FORTRAN or Algol." — Brian Kernighan