COBOL

In 1959, Grace Murray Hopper led a team of developers, from the Conference on Data Systems Languages, to create COBOL, the successor of Hopper's FLOW-MATIC language. COBOL is a programming language that stands for COmmon, Business-Oriented, Language. It was developed so that there could be a common language that can run on multiple computers and with any operating system, rather than the each computer maker using their own programming language to tell a computer what to do. After its release, businesses and corporation started to integrate COBOL into their business data processing, making it the first widespread computer language. Many companies quickly adopted COBOL and this inspired other developers to create common langugaes liek FORTRAN. This language was so useful that it was used by government and business data processing for decades and is still used today for banking.