Commissioned for this museum · after the language designed by the CODASYL committee, 1959

hello, world

COBOL·1959·10 lines·200 bytes

       IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
       PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.

       ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.

       DATA DIVISION.

       PROCEDURE DIVISION.
           DISPLAY "hello, world".
           STOP RUN.

Curator’s note

Ten lines to print twelve characters, and eight of those lines are the program explaining who it is before it is allowed to do anything.

The four divisions are not ceremony for its own sake. COBOL was designed in 1959 to be read by people who did not write it — auditors, managers, the next programmer — and the divisions are a filing system: who I am, what machine I expect, what data I touch, what I do. Two of them are empty here because this program touches no data and assumes no machine, and they are still written out, because the shape is the point.

Notice the indentation is not style. Original COBOL was punched onto cards where columns 1–6 held sequence numbers, column 7 was reserved for continuation and comment marks, and code began in column 8. That margin is a physical object — the left edge of a punched card — still visible in a file written today.

And notice the full stops. Statements end with a period, like sentences, because the committee genuinely intended managers to read this. It is the most optimistic idea in the history of programming languages, it did not work, and the language it produced went on to run the world's payrolls for sixty years.