COBOL

The name COBOL is an acronym for Common Business Oriented Language.

COBOL was initially created in 1959 by The Short Range Committee, one of three committees defined at a meeting held at the Pentagon in May 1959, organized by Charles Phillips of the US Department of Defense. The Short Range Committee was formed to recommend at short range approach to a common businees language. The Short Range Committee was made up of members representing 6 computer manufacturers and 3 government agencies. In particular, the six computer manufacturers were Burroughs, IBM, Minneapolis-Honeywell, RCA, Sperry Rand ,and Sylvania Electric Products. And, the three government agencies were the US Air Force,

the David Taylor Model Basin, and the National Bureau of Standards. This committee was chaired by a member of NBS. (An Intermediate-Range Committee and a Long-Range Committee

were defined at the Pentagon meeting as well.While the Intermediate Range Committeee was formed, it was never operational. The Long-Range Committee was never formed.) In the end a sub committee of the Short Range Committee developed the specifications of the COBOL language. This subcommittee was made up of six individuals:

William Selden and Gertrude Tierney of IBM.
Howard Bromberg and Howard Discount of RCA.
Vernon Reeves and Jean E. Sammet of Sylvania Electric Products.

This subcommitee completed the specifications for COBOL as the year of 1959 came to an end.

These were approved by the full Short Range Committee. From there, they were approved by the Executive Commitee (ask me another time about this) in January 1960, and sent to the government printing office, which edited and printed these specifications as Cobol 60.

Source: J.E. Sammet. "The Early History of Cobol." In History of Programming Languages, edited by R.L. Wexelblat. New York: ACM Monograph Series,1981.----

A ProgrammingLanguage that was developed within a six month period, and yet is still in use over 40 years later.

For other vintage programming languages see Basic, Fortran, PL1, Algol.