Radio 4: Codes that Changed the World
2. Cobol
Clips from this programme
Introduction: COBOL: Like the Vogons, Inefficient, verbose and ugly from 1950s, so embedded into financial systems no-one dares un-pick them
Duration: 01:01
COBOL: For organising finances, for bean counters, still extensively used in business: Crude.
Duration: 02:53
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper - The Mark 1 Computer, moving on to Computers for all via Compilers than allow communication than resembles a human language. For business: COBOL-verbose
Duration: 06:41
COBOL - a dominant language, still. The Millennium Bug
Duration: 03:15
Credits
Duration: 00:05Radio 4: Codes that Changed the World
1. Fortran
First broadcast: 6th April 2015
Duration 13:56
Aleks Krotoski tells the story of the languages that have been used to talk to machines. 1/5. Fortran: The language that helped put men on the moon and harness the atom.
2. Cobol
First broadcast: 7th April 2015
Duration 13:55
Aleks Krotoski tells the story of computer languages. 2/5. Cobol: Inefficient, verbose and ugly, yet by the 1990s, 80 per cent of the world's business software was written in it.
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3. Basic
First broadcast: 8th April 2015
Duration 13:56
Aleks Krotoski tells the story of computer languages. 3/5. Basic: As language of choice for home computing in the 1980s, Basic became iconic
4. Java
First broadcast: 9th April 2015
Duration 13:44
Aleks Krotoski tells the story of computer languages. 4/5. Java: The programming language that people probably interact with on a daily basis more than any other.
5. The Tower of Babel
First broadcast: 10th April 2015
Duration 13:52
Aleks Krotoski tells the story of computer languages. 5/5. The Tower of Babel: Aleks likens today's digital world to a reverse Tower of Babel.