The aging tech running so much of our lives.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Jammale. The programming language known as Koball, which stands for a common business oriented language, turns 65 this year.

That, we couldn't help but notice, is right around retirement age, but Koball is nowhere near retirement. It remains a mainstay of IT operations at

government agencies, businesses, and financial institutions and

and yet the programming language which is older than the Beatles is no longer taught at most universities.

Tech journalist Glenn Fleischman has been writing about this.

I asked him if our reliance on Koball is a problem.

There was a point in the evolution of computers where they went from being

devices that were barely interactive and the code was written at a very low level.

You had to write each instruction and test things and it was practically like wiring a machine.

And then there was a, as computers became more powerful, but also as the people involved in computing

understood better what they wanted out of computers they wanted to be able to

write in a higher level language so when you looked at it you could read the code and understand it.

It wasn't just a bunch of numbers or abstracted instructions.

So Koball was the human readable-ish programming language that allowed business logic so things that have to do

with running your business or running the government to be expressed in a way that

someone else could also look at and understand and revise.

And you've written that six decades after its creation, you'd expect Koball to be, quote, the

stuff of looping narrative videos at computer history museums,

which makes it all the more surprising

that in real life, Kobol is still kind of everywhere.

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