Today in 1959, a meeting was held at the Pentagon, started the development of a common programming language for business, eventually called COBOL or Common Business Oriented Language.
Anticipating DARPA and the creation of the internet ten years later, the Department of Defense was concerned about whether it could run the same data processing programs on different computers. FORTRAN, the only mainstream language at the time, lacked the features needed to write such programs.
In Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (2009), Kurt Beyer reports on a survey conducted in 1959 which found that in any data processing installation, the programming cost $800,000 on average and that translating programs to run on new hardware would cost $600,000. The survey suggested that with a common business-oriented language, conversion would be far cheaper and faster.