COBOL at 60

Micro Focus commenced its COBOL60 activities, celebrating the continued relevance of information technology’s most enduring business language. Known for its innovation, portability, readability, and business-centricity, COBOL has continually expanded and adapted to support new technologies and business demands.

COBOL at 60

Created in 1959 as a U.S Department of Defense project to assist data processing, the revolutionary language was built to last through the expert design work of Grace Hopper, Jean Sammet, and others. Since starting with the development of a COBOL compiler in 1976, Micro Focus has spearheaded the evolution and innovation of the language and the contemporary technology that supports it.

“Our current digital economy is changing rapidly and while core business processing remains critically at the heart of that change, COBOL is fully equipped to meet today’s and tomorrow’s business needs,” said Chris Livesey, Senior Vice President, Application Modernization and Connectivity at Micro Focus. “Modernizing trusted COBOL systems is a proven path to success, which is why COBOL is and will remain to be the bedrock of digital transformation.”

Micro Focus offers products for those learning, maintaining and building upon core COBOL applications. Micro Focus continues to invest millions each year in mainframe and distributed COBOL application analyzer products, as well as modern IDE-based mainframe and distributed COBOL application development products (Visual COBOL and Enterprise Developer) and server deployment products.

“Evolving to support a wide range of contemporary digital technologies, COBOL applications are continuing to be enhanced and extended, yet the language remains readable enough for anyone to learn and maintain it,” said Derek Britton, Global Director of Product Marketing, Application Modernization and Connectivity at Micro Focus. “COBOL continues to modernize - it is a language that was designed to stand the test of time, with six decades of heritage, billions of lines of value and scores of practitioners using it to this very day.”

As part of Micro Focus’ COBOL60 activities, the following resources are available:

• The Micro Focus white paper “COBOL at 60: A Living Legend” 
• The Micro Focus COBOL eBook hosted by IBM Systems Magazine
• The Micro Focus webinar “COBOL- Here’s to the Next 60 Years”
• Micro Focus’ COBOL Academic Program
• The Micro Focus #DevDay event on September 19, 2019, New York City 
• The Micro Focus Application Modernization and Connectivity products and solutions