Our friends at Micro Focus shared this with us: September 18th marked the 50th birthday of COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language. Half a century after its conception, more people and systems use COBOL than at any time in its existence. The language powers almost all global ATM transactions, runs nearly three quarters of the world's business applications, and books hundreds of trips every day. There are understood to be over 200 billion lines of COBOL code in existence, with hundreds more being created every single day. Micro Focus estimates that people still use COBOL at least 13 times throughout the course of an average working day. Yet, despite using the technology so often, only 18% of people surveyed had ever actually heard of COBOL.
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