The first computers were huge clunky machines that required a room the size of a planet and could only be programmed by people with a brain the size of a planet.
They were heavily oriented towards mathematical problems and their potential for business settings was yet to be realised.
A few nerdy readers might understand the following example, but to everyone else, this line of code looks like something from an ancient book of spells:
addb $10, (%eax)
You know an immature technology when it forces you to have intimate knowledge of its inner workings. You can boil a kettle without understanding Ohms law or how the coils inside are wound.
While our example does nothing more than add two numbers, there's a fug of other necessary steps that we won't bore you with here.
Clearly, the old computers were far too expensive and cumbersome beyond their niche.
In the early 1950s, Grace Hopper was thinking about how to make computer programming easier.
Although she had a PhD in mathematics from Yale University, she understood that a crucial step was to simplify the job.
One way to do that was to bundle a sequence of steps into a single command. In the ADD example, the half dozen supporting lines of code could be hidden inside a statement that does the extra work behind the scenes.
Her other idea was to use common verbs such as PERFORM and SUBTRACT with English-like syntax.
Thus, working with other computer scientists, the COBOL language was born.
Its name "common business-oriented language" reveals the insight that computers should be useful for many things such as accounting and customer management systems.
The notion that anybody could program a computer using COBOL proved naive because even now programming is a complex task.
The resulting programs were wordy affairs. Modern computer languages have retreated from that somewhat in favour of other strategies.
Still, COBOL proved immensely popular. Billions of lines of code have been written while the language has evolved through several generations.
Today there remains gargantuan COBOL computer systems that are large and so complicated that nobody fully understands.
They perform critical functions, making organisations wary of replacing them. Indeed, there have been a few failed, expensive attempts to do so.
The number of COBOL-enabled programmers is dwindling, which isn't helping.
That leaves a legacy of aged systems to continue chugging away in the computer rooms for a long while yet.
In a curious parallel, Grace Hopper was retired from the Naval Reserve at the mandatory age of 60, but her work was considered so important that she was recalled to duty in August 1967.
Later, she became a rear admiral after a special decree by then-president Ronald Reagan.
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