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<DIV>As a practitioner, not a historian, I can't debate the details of the
creation of COBOL. But I joined Bob Bemer's group in IBM's Data Processing
Division in February, 1960 (Roy Goldfinger was part of that group). IBM had
designed COMTRAN as the counterpart of FORTRAN and planned to make the language
available for use by any manufacturer or user company just as it had with
FORTRAN. The IBM people felt that COMTRAN was a consistent language and was
superior to COBOL and continued to plan to implement COMTRAN compilers
in 1960. But, as I recall, the pressure from DoD particularly was too strong and
therefore IBM made a marketing decision to drop COMTRAN and only support COBOL,
in spite of what IBM perceived as its deficiencies.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I was not privy to the debates within the CODASYL committee, only to what I
heard from Bob Bemer and Roy Goldfinger (and other members of Bemer's team),
about how the final decisions were made,,,but I had a strong impression that the
other manufacturers (Univac, RCA, Honeywell and others) were not willing to
have IBM be the "owner" of the commercial language as it was of the scientific
language.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>There is no doubt in my mind that Grace Hopper believed that COBOL
was principally based on her work at Univac (she is quoted in many
interviews to that effect including at least one on the Computer
History Museum website) and, barring any forensic analysis that
provesd otherwise, I expect that is as close to the truth as we will get now
that so many of the CODASYL participants have died and probably have not left
detailed records of the committee deliberations. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Burt Grad </DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>