Autocoding at Work: COBOL and the Specification of the American Office

This article examines the automation of clerical labor as a linguistic project with implications for the meaning and organization of office work independently of computers. COBOL, the Common Business Oriented Language, was developed in 1959 with the aim of enabling programming to take place “basically in English.” COBOL’s architects argued not only that programming could be made legible to management, but also that business data-processing could and should remake English in its own image in a manner that purportedly did not depend fundamentally on the use of a computer. While advertisements imagined secretaries taking over programming, in reality business computing rearranged paper-based secretarial labor to accommodate the constraints of specific programs. All clerical procedures were to be in a sense reprogrammed; not everyone would program the computer, but no clerical worker could remain “machine independent.”