A 65-year-old programming language called COBOL still quietly processes

In April 2020, in the middle of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the state of New Jersey’s unemployment system collapsed.

Hundreds of thousands of newly-unemployed residents were trying to file claims. The system, built in the 1970s and never fully replaced, could not handle the load. Applications were dropping. Payments were stalling. The state’s emergency response was overwhelmed.

Governor Phil Murphy went on television and did something almost nobody expected. He appealed, publicly, for volunteers. Specifically, he appealed for retired COBOL programmers who could come out of retirement and help fix the system. He needed people who could work with a programming language that was, at that point, sixty-one years old, and that almost no one under fifty knew well enough to touch.

The state was rescued, in the end, by a mixture of retirees, contractors, and a slow but successful patchwork of fixes. But the image lingered. A governor of a modern US state, in the twenty-first century, going on live television to beg for help from people old enough to remember Kennedy — because the software running his state’s economy was written in a language they were among the last people alive to speak fluently.

That is the future the global banking industry is now staring down at much larger scale.

What COBOL still does

COBOL was created in 1959, at a meeting of American computer scientists working with the US Department of Defense. Its co-designer was Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, the same programmer who famously found the physical moth in a Harvard Mark II relay in 1947 and taped it into her logbook, coining the term computer bug in the process. Hopper wanted a language ordinary business people could read — a language where a line of code looked something like “MOVE ACCOUNT-BALANCE TO DISPLAY-AREA” rather than a wall of symbols.

She succeeded. COBOL — Common Business-Oriented Language — became the workhorse language of the entire enterprise computing world through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Banks adopted it. Insurance companies adopted it. Government agencies adopted it. Payroll systems, inventory systems, banking ledgers, tax processing, benefits administration — for four decades, if you needed a computer to move money around reliably, at scale, you almost certainly wrote the code in COBOL.

Then, in the 1990s, the world moved on. Newer languages arrived. Object-oriented programming became the norm. COBOL was relegated to the category of “legacy code” — technology that still worked but that people mostly stopped writing.

Except the code that had already been written in COBOL did not disappear. It kept running. It kept processing transactions. It kept moving money.

Today, six decades later, the numbers are genuinely startling. Roughly $3 trillion in daily commerce is estimated to pass through COBOL systems globally. Around 95 percent of ATM transactions touch COBOL code somewhere in their chain….