A COBOL Manual. Image Courtesy of BlogSpot.

COBOL

COBOL, Common Business-Oriented Language, is a programming language created by Grace Hopper. It was made to work on many computers, and its purpose was calculating business and data processing needs; keeping track of payroll, property tracking, and budget making. The COBOL programs were written on magnetic tape, using the Unityper.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a demand for COBOL programmers arose in multiple states, such as New Jersey and Connecticut. These states are struggling to process the influx of unemployment claims; their systems rely on COBOL, and they have a lack of COBOL programmers.

“Literally, we have systems that are 40-plus-years-old. There’ll be lots of postmortems and one of them on our list will be how did we get here when we literally needed COBOL programmers.”

-New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy

Here is a short COBOL program.

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION

PROGRAM-ID. NEW.

PROCEDURE DIVISION.

DISPLAY ‘Grace Hopper’.

STOP RUN.

This is the program compiled in binary

01001001 01000100 01000101 01001110 01010100 01001001 01000110 01001001 01000011 01000001 01010100 01001001 01001111 01001110 00100000 01000100 01001001 01010110 01001001 01010011 01001001 01001111 01001110 00001010 01010000 01010010 01001111 01000111 01010010 01000001 01001101 00101101 01001001 01000100 00101110 00100000 01001110 01000101 01010111 00101110 00001010 00001010 01010000 01010010 01001111 01000011 01000101 01000100 01010101 01010010 01000101 00100000 01000100 01001001 01010110 01001001 01010011 01001001 01001111 01001110 00101110 00001010 01000100 01001001 01010011 01010000 01001100 01000001 01011001 00100000 10000000011000 01000111 01110010 01100001 01100011 01100101 00100000 01001000 01101111 01110000 01110000 01100101 01110010 10000000011001 00101110 00001010 00001010 01010011 01010100 01001111 01010000 00100000 01010010 01010101 01001110 00101110 00100000 00001010

Flow-Matic

Grace Hopper invented the Flow-Matic in 1952, The Flow-Matic, also known as the B-0 compiler, transferred operator input into code, which was then checked with the pre-built code library; that code was then saved onto a magnetic tape.

The Flow-Matic. Image Courtesy of Computer History Museum