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On 8 April 1959, Mary K. Hawes, a computer scientist at Burroughs Corporation, called a meeting of representatives from academia, computer users, and manufacturers at the University of Pennsylvania to organize a formal meeting on common business languages. Representatives included Grace Hopper (inventor of the English-like data processing language FLOW-MATIC), Jean Sammet and Saul Gorn.[15][16]

At the April meeting, the group asked the Department of Defense (DoD) to sponsor an effort to create a common business language. The delegation impressed Charles A. Phillips, director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD, who thought that they "thoroughly understood" the DoD's problems. The DoD operated 225 computers, had a further 175 on order and had spent over $200 million on implementing programs to run on them. Portable programs would save time, reduce costs and ease modernization.

Charles Phillips agreed to sponsor the meeting and tasked the delegation with drafting the agenda.

COBOL programs are used globally in governments and businesses and are running on diverse operating systems such as z/OS, z/VSE, VME, Unix, OpenVMS and Windows. In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code and 5 billion lines more being written annually.

Near the end of the 20th century, the year 2000 problem (Y2K) was the focus of significant COBOL programming effort, sometimes by the same programmers who had designed the systems decades before. The particular level of effort required to correct COBOL code has been attributed[by whom?] to the large amount of business-oriented COBOL, as business applications use dates heavily, and to fixed-length data fields. After the clean-up effort put into these programs for Y2K, a 2003 survey found that many remained in use.[105] The authors said that the survey data suggest "a gradual decline in the importance of Cobol in application development over the [following] 10 years unless ... integration with other languages and technologies can be adopted".

In 2006 and 2012, Computerworld surveys found that over 60% of organizations used COBOL (more than C++ and Visual Basic .NET) and that for half of those, COBOL was used for the majority of their internal software. 36% of managers said they planned to migrate from COBOL, and 25% said they would like to if it was cheaper. Instead, some businesses have migrated their systems from expensive mainframes to cheaper, more modern systems, while maintaining their COBOL programs.

Testimony before the House of Representatives in 2016 indicated that COBOL is still in use by many federal agencies.[108] Reuters reported in 2017 that 43% of banking systems still used COBOL with over 220 billion lines of COBOL code in use.

By 2019, the number of COBOL programmers was shrinking fast due to retirements, leading to an impending skills gap in business and government organizations which still use mainframe systems for high-volume transaction processing. Efforts to rewrite systems in newer languages have proven expensive and problematic, as has the outsourcing of code maintenance, thus proposals to train more people in COBOL are advocated.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing surge of unemployment, several US states reported a shortage of skilled COBOL programmers to support the legacy systems used for unemployment benefit management. Many of these systems had been in the process of conversion to more modern programming languages prior to the pandemic, but the process had to be put on hold. Similarly, the US Internal Revenue Service rushed to patch its COBOL-based Individual Master File in order to disburse the tens of millions of payments mandated by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act.

COBOL has an English

In computing, the print command provides single-user print spooling capability in a number of operating systems. It is roughly similar to that provided by the UNIX System V lp and BSD lpr print spooler systems. The command is available in the DEC RT-11, OS/8, RSX-11, TOPS-10, and TOPS-20 operating systems and also in DR FlexOS, DR DOS, TSL PC-MOS, Paragon Technology PTS-DOS, SISNE plus, IBM OS/2, eComStation, ArcaOS, Microsoft Windows, FreeDOS, Stratus OpenVOS, AROS, HP MPE/iX, and OpenVMS.

The FreeDOS version was developed by James Tabor and is licensed under the GPL.
The command was introduced in MS-DOS/IBM PC DOS 2.0.[17][18] DR DOS 6.0 includes an implementation of the PRINT command.

In early versions of DOS, printing was accomplished using the copy command: the file to be printed was "copied" to the file representing the print device. Control returned to the user when the print job completed. Beginning with DOS 2.0, the print command was included to allow basic print spooling: the ability to continue to use the computer while printing occurred in the background, and the ability to create a queue of jobs to be printed. The print command allowed specifying one of many possible local printer interfaces, and could make use of networked printers using the net command. A maximum number of files and a maximum buffer size could be specified, and further command-line options allowed adding and removing files from the queue. Margins, page lengths and number of copies could also be set, as well as a parameter to adjust between favoring printing speed versus computer responsiveness. Users of the initial release of the print command commented on the slow print speed and high resource usage, as well as the lack of support for the newly introduced subdirectories. The command was among the first RAM-resident programs and was the first to achieve widespread use, with many users disassembling the binary in order to determine how RAM-resident programs should be written.