COBOL :)

More about COBOL :)

The programming language orginated by Grace Hopper in the 1960's, when computers took up a whole room and only had 16K of memory, and hard disks that looked like top-loading washing machines. Most businesses used COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), the only other popular programming languages were FORTRAN (Formula Translator) and Assembler (which assembled machine-code instructions). Basic and C/C++ were to later emerge in the next decade, and computers get smaller and more powerful. The early "mainframes" were so called because the electronics were wire-wrapped on a huge metal frame chassis about 6 feet tall and 19 inches wide, weighing about 500 pounds and taking about 4 kilowatts. They ran at about 500 kHz (half a million operations per second) whereas today your mobile phone or desktop PC may take only 20 watts and run at 3GHz (three thousand million operations per second). The first job I got in 1976 after leaving college used COBOL on a huge ICL mainframe; by 1979 the Apple ][ had emerged, about the size of a briefcase and using a 6502 microprocessor chip running at 1MHz, running Applesoft Basic and 6502 Assembler. Two floppy disk drives, each the size of an icecream carton, allowed 140K of program and data storage using DOS 3.3. Then in 1981 IBM introduced the PC. It was soon cloned by various Japanese firms, bringing the price down to around £500. (The old Mainframes cost about £1,000,000 each).