Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) celebrates its fiftieth birthday today – and new research released to coincide with the anniversary suggests that it is still widely used throughout the world.

It was at a meeting in the Pentagon on May 28, 1959, that the Short Range Committee was established, and would soon create the very first description of COBOL. It is thought there is now over 200 billion lines of COBOL code in existence with hundreds more being created every day.

David Stephenson, UK country general manager, Micro Focus, said: “COBOL emerged at the very birth of the computer industry, yet despite numerous other languages’ attempts to steal its crown, none have proved to be as well-suited to their tasks as COBOL. It predates the microprocessor by a whole decade (1969), and was already running the bulk of the world’s biggest businesses before the likes of Microsoft (1975), Apple (1976) and Oracle (1977) had even been established.”

“The founders of Google, arguably the most pervasive of modern technologies, were mere toddlers at this time, yet COBOL’s robustness, core performance and ability to adapt to newer technologies means there are still 200 times more COBOL transactions every day than searches on Google itself,” Stephenson said.

To celebrate this milestone, Micro Focus conducted a survey of nearly 2,000 people throughout the UK to examine how much COBOL is still used. The research found that during an average working day, people interact with COBOL at least 10 times.

COBOL is still used to drive most ATM transactions and is involved in most financial transactions that take place. The research found that people in the UK make two online transactions every week, withdraw cash from an ATM every two days and use their credit/debit card every single day.

When mobile phone use is taken into consideration, people use COBOL up to 60 times every week or 250 times a month. Despite these figures, only 18% of people confessed to knowing what COBOL actually is.

Jan Stuart, who has been programming COBOL since 1978, said: “COBOL is just a great language for business and it isn’t going away. It has kept me in steady employment for many decades, but despite retiring, I’m in as much demand as ever.”