Is This The Most Important Code Nobody Can Replace?

The last time you used an ATM, there's a good chance the money moved through code written in a language designed in 1959, by a committee that met at the Pentagon, on a three-month deadline. This is the story of COBOL. It starts with Mary Hawes, who called the first meeting, and Charles Phillips, the Air Force colonel who hosted it at the Pentagon. COBOL was meant to be a stopgap. Instead, the long-range committee was never formed, a rival design called FACT nearly replaced it, and RCA's Howard Bromberg got so fed up that he mailed a fifteen-dollar tombstone engraved "COBOL" to the Pentagon. He didn't admit it until 1985. You'll meet Jean Sammet and the six people who wrote the language in two weeks in New York, hear why Sammet said Grace Hopper was not the mother of COBOL, and see the December 1960 test that ran the same program on an RCA 501 and a Univac. Then come Dijkstra's verdict, Y2K, Reuters' 95 percent of ATM swipes, New Jersey's 2020 call for "cobalt" programmers, and the AI blog post that gave IBM its worst day since 2000. What was the first COBOL program you ever wrote, and what machine did it run on? Did you work on Y2K? Tell me in the comments. And if I got a date, a number or a name wrong, tell me there too. I read every comment and I pin corrections. Watch the Fortran story: https://youtu.be/6hMGCG4TvN0 Watch the BASIC story: https://youtu.be/IFNo5sYkcbI Parts That Changed History tells the stories behind the chips, machines and parts that shaped the modern world, and the people who built them. Subscribe for a new story every day. SOURCES Jean E. Sammet, "The Early History of COBOL," ACM History of Programming Languages, 1978/1981 Computer History Museum: The COBOL Tombstone, and the transcript of COBOL's 25th Anniversary Celebration, The Computer Museum, May 16, 1985 IEEE Computer Society, Computer Pioneers: Charles A. Phillips Smithsonian National Museum of American History: First Draft of COBOL (1959) and the COBOL 50th anniversary exhibit historyofinformation.com: First demonstration of compatibility between computers from different manufacturers, December 6 and 7, 1960 Edsger W. Dijkstra, EWD498, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" June 18, 1975 Gartner Group Y2K cost estimates, 1997 to 1998 Reuters, "Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT cowboys ride into sunset," April 2017 The Register, "COBOL-coding volunteers sought as slammed mainframes slow New Jersey's coronavirus response," April 5, 2020 Reuters and CNBC coverage of IBM shares after Anthropic's COBOL modernization post, February 23, 2026 CNN, "Websites shut down globally after AI finds a critical flaw affecting 70% of the internet," October 2026 Wikipedia: COBOL; CODASYL; Jean E. Sammet; Grace Hopper; FLOW-MATIC #COBOL #ComputerHistory #Programming