COBOL Tombstone

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  • Description
Date
1960
Copyright Owner
Mark Richards
Object ID
X572_85

The committee that developed the COBOL programming language endured criticism, with many skeptics predicting that the new language would be a failure. Committee member Howard Bromberg had this tombstone made for the team as a practical joke, but COBOL turned out to be a great success. By 1997, over 200 billion lines of COBOL code were still running on critical systems around the world. Hopper served on the committee and was an enthusiastic promoter of COBOL.