History

COBOL was first introduced in 1959 by a team of programmers led by Grace Hopper. Its development was motivated by the need for a programming language that could be used across multiple manufacturers' hardware in order to streamline business application development. COBOL was designed to be easily readable and understandable by non-technical business users, as well as to be easily maintainable and optimized for large-scale batch processing.

COBOL was widely adopted by the business world, and its popularity surged in the 1970s and 1980s. During this time, COBOL was the de facto standard for business application development, and many large corporations built their entire IT infrastructures on COBOL-based applications. However, as newer programming languages such as C++, Java, and Python emerged, COBOL's popularity began to wane.