Re: COBOL history, Article on new mainframe use

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:

Um, if you spent ten seconds looking at the 1960 COBOL report, you
would have found IBM listed as one of the contributors, and it
specifically lists the IBM Commercial Translator as one of thte
sources for COBOL.

Bob Bemer
https://history.computer.org/pioneers/bemer.htm
Bemer is the inventor of the words "Cobol," and "CODASYL," six ASCII
characters, and the concepts of registry and escape sequences in
character codes. He also invented the term and defined the nature of the
"software factory." At IBM he developed the first load-and-go system
(PRINT I) and also was responsible for the implementation of the
programming system FORTRANSIT, which provided a quick first compiler for
the IBM 650 computer, and was the first programming language to run both
decimal (IBM 650) and binary (IBM 704) computers. For the support of
commercial programming Bemer developed PRINT I; in the late 1950s he
developed XTRAN, a step towards Algol, and "Commercial Translator,"
which became a significant input to Cobol. His major Cobol innovations
were the IDENTIFICATION and ENVIRONMENT divisions, and the PICTURE
clause.

web bages gone 404, but lives on at wayback machine
https://web.archive.org/web/20180402200149/http://www.bobbemer.com/HISTORY.HTM

Bemer wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Bemer
He served on the committee which amalgamated the design for his COMTRAN
language with Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC and thus produced the
specifications for COBOL. He also served, with Hugh McGregor Ross and
others, on the separate committee which defined the ASCII character
codeset in 1960, contributing several characters which were not formerly
used by computers including the escape (ESC), backslash (\), and curly
brackets ({}).[3] As a result, he is sometimes known as The Father of
ASCII.[1]

COMTRAN wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMTRAN
COMTRAN (COMmercial TRANslator) is an early programming language
developed at IBM. It was intended as the business programming equivalent
of the scientific programming language FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator). It
served as one of the forerunners to the COBOL language. Developed by Bob
Bemer, in 1957, the language was the first to feature the programming
language element known as a picture clause.

COMTRAN manual
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/7090/F28-8043_CommercialTranslatorGenInfMan_Ju60.pdf

Bob Bemer papers
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8j96cf7/
He later played a key role in the development of the COBOL programming
language, which drew on aspects of Bemer's COMTRAN programming language
developed at IBM. Bemer is credited with the first public identification
of the Y2K problem, publishing in 1971 his concern that the standard
representation of the year in calendar dates within computer programs by
the last two digits rather than the full four digits would cause serious
errors in confusing the year 2000 with the year 1900.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970