--- $2 trillion dollars is the total investment in COBOL systems

--- 5 billion lines of new COBOL are developed every year

--- 90% of global financial transactions are processed in COBOL.

--- 75% of all daily business transactions are processed in COBOL

--- 70% of all worldwide business data is stored on a Mainframe

--- 70% of mission-critical applications are in COBOL

--- The language supports over 30 billion transactions per day.

--- There are 1.5-2 million developers, globally, working with

    COBOL code.

--- 15% of all new application functionality will be written in

    COBOL

--- 310 billion lines of software are in use today and over 220

    billion lines are in COBOL

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--- COBOL is extremely scalable.

--- COBOL can support large volumes of transactional data.

--- COBOL is extremely reliable for mission-critical applications,

    particularly when run on mainframes.

--- COBOL is an easy-to-learn language that adapts well to business

    needs.

--- COBOL is extremely portable across platforms.

COBOL (pronounced /ˈkoʊbɒl/) is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. The COBOL 2002 standard includes support for object-oriented programming and other modern language features. A specification of COBOL was initially created during the second half of 1959 by Grace Hopper. The scene was set on April 8 at a meeting of computer manufacturers, users, and university people at the University of Pennsylvania Computing Center; subsequently, the United States Department of Defense agreed to sponsor and oversee the next activities. A meeting was held at the Pentagon on May 28 and 29 (exactly one year after the Zürich ALGOL 58 meeting), chaired by Charles A. Phillips. There it was decided to set up three committees, short, intermediate and long range (the last one was actually never formed). It was the Short Range Committee.

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