Sixth Sense

Do we really have Sixth Sense?

Humans have five basic senses, which enable them to interact with the outside world. These are: hearing, smell, sight, taste, and touch. Many people seem to possess a sixth sense (psychic sense). This (sixth sense) helps people to sense information beyond the domain of five senses, and have claimed to predict the future, sense spirits and read others mind.
The term sixth sense was coined by the German scientist Dr Rudolf Tischner in 1920. He defined this as an Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) which include telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, retrocognition and psychometry.

Telepathy refers to mind-to-mind communication. Clairvoyance is the ability to see things not available by known senses. Precognition is the power to foresee future events, Retrocognition is the strength to see past events and psychometry is the power to know the history of an object.
Every person has experienced sixth sense at some point or other during his or her lives. The degree varies from individual to individual. It is still not known how the sixth sense operates, and it is not associated with any of the body organs. This leads to the conclusion that the process is entirely mental involving human soul or the subconscious mind.
Scottish researchers claim to have found scientific proof for communication among spiritual mediums. Prof Archie Roy concludes that mediums communicate using more than the five normal senses. In his experiments the communication was established using a microphone and the identities of all involved were physically separated in different rooms and kept confidential. The research is still on to prove how the medium actually transmits this information. If there is an emotional tie between two individuals, the medium can pick the signals. This can be compared to the transmission of radio signals.

The only person who can certify this phemomenon is the one who actually receives the message. Researchers at Germany’s Freiberg University seem to have evidence in support of the existence of sixth sense.
Some researchers refer sixth sense to be an instinct. Animals and the insects use it all the time. The intuitive human mind wants empirical evidence for all the traits. Further, the empirical evidence is not separated from other five senses.

There are lot of examples, like radio waves, where we cannot perceive things with our five senses. Certain high pitch voices are there, which only the dogs can hear. It took years of research to prove that there exist things called "germs". These are beyond the purview of the five basic senses. We cannot see, taste, feel, hear or smell germs on our hands.

There are number of evidences, where the dogs have warned their masters of some potential mishappening. Many animals get nervous before an earthquake is to occur. This may be attributed either to their sixth sense or vibration sensory powers, more sensitive than humans.
It has been reported that the animals’ "sixth sense" saved them from recent tsunami disaster. Sri Lankan wildlife officials have said the giant waves that killed over 24,000 people along the Indian Ocean island’s coast seemingly missed wild beasts, with no dead animals found. The waves washed floodwaters upto two miles inland biggest wildlife reserve of Srilanka, hosting hundreds of wild elephants and leopards, but not a single body of any animal was found. There are many reports of birds detecting impending disasters.

There are numerous stories of people having dreams that later came true to some extent. Abraham Lincoln is said to have dreamt of his death, days before he was assassinated. A completely blind Britisher has been shown to possess "sixth sense" which enables him to recognise emotions on people’s faces. Brain scans of the blind person revealed that when the man looked at faces depicting emotion, it activated a part of his brain called the right amygdala, which responds to non-verbal emotional signals.

The research to prove the existence of sixth sense is going on. For verification, the phenomenon must be measurable and repeatable. The drawback with sixth sense is that it is impossible to repeat experiments with it. The more the person attempts to use his sixth sense, the less it seems to work.

All the medical explanations have failed for near death experiences. "Cybersense" has already emerged as a weak link between the five senses and the sixth sense. The inventions of modern times were research topics a few years back. The research on sixth sense will pave the way for facts and conclusions related to this intuitive sense.

With Spl.Thanx to Deepak,

...Ravi

How you feel about it, pleave your comment here...

Reincarnation according to Hinduism

What do you think about Reincarnation???

Reincarnation is a core belief within Hinduism. In most Indian philosophical traditions, including the Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and Jain systems, an ongoing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth is assumed as a fact of nature. These systems differ widely, however, in the terminology with which they describe the process and in the metaphysics they use in interpreting it. Within Hinduism, it is avidya, or ignorance, of one's true self, that leads to ego-consciousness of the body and the phenomenal world. This grounds one in desire and the perpetual chain of karma and reincarnation।

In India the concept of reincarnation is recorded in detail within the Upanishads (c. 800 BCE), which are philosophical and religious texts composed in Sanskrit. The notion of reincarnation is most notably present in the Śvetāśvatara Upanishad 5.11 and Kauśītāki Upanishad 1.2. According to Professor Joanna Jurewicz of Warsaw University, reincarnation theory is also found in the Rigveda, which generally considered the oldest Hindu scripture.

According to Hinduism, the soul (atman) is immortal, while the body is subject to birth and death. The Bhagavad Gita states that:
Worn-out garments are shed by the body; Worn-out bodies are shed by the dweller within the body. New bodies are donned by the dweller, like garments.[2]
The idea that the soul (of any living being - including animals, humans and plants) reincarnates is intricately linked to karma, another concept first introduced in the Upanishads. Karma (literally: action) is the sum of one's actions, and the force that determines one's next reincarnation. The cycle of death and rebirth, governed by karma, is referred to as samsara.
Hinduism teaches that the soul goes on repeatedly being born and dying. One is reborn on account of desire: a person desires to be born because he or she wants to enjoy worldly pleasures, which can be enjoyed only through a body.[3] Hinduism does not teach that all worldly pleasures are sinful, but it teaches that they can never bring deep, lasting happiness or peace (ānanda). According to the Hindu sage Adi Shankaracharya - the world as we ordinarily understand it - is like a dream: fleeting and illusory. To be trapped in Samsara is a result of ignorance of the true nature of being.
After many births, every person eventually becomes dissatisfied with the limited happiness that worldly pleasures can bring. At this point, a person begins to seek higher forms of happiness, which can be attained only through spiritual experience. When, after much spiritual practice (sādhanā), a person finally realizes his or her own divine nature—ie., realizes that the true "self" is the immortal soul rather than the body or the ego—all desires for the pleasures of the world will vanish, since they will seem insipid compared to spiritual ānanda. When all desire has vanished, the person will not be reborn anymore.

...Ravi

Dreams predict the future

Can Dreams predict the future?

I think..... all dreams come true, but not always as we see them in the dream. I have a standard answer for this question which I copy below. I notice that this question is getting more and more frequent on this site. It is encouraging to see that dreamers today come out freely with this mysterious happening. Not so long ago people were afraid of talking about it fearing that others will think they are mad. But they are not mad, they are very sharp observers and also very fortunate for it is a sign of waking up to the true meaning of life. Here is my lenghty answer to this mystery. If I made it shorter I would not do the dream proper justice.

Dreaming things ahead comes up quite often on this site; I am keeping count of it and process the results. The odds are in favour of dreams coming true. I have studied this matter for forty years and have learnt to read dreams the way you read your news paper. I see my dreams coming true every day and beyond.

Those who say dreams do not come true have not studied them. They speak off the cuff. If anyone says to you: “Dreams are not of the future, ask them this question: “How many dreams have you recorded and followed up?” And by following up I mean looking at what happens every day and beyond that might correspond with your dreams recorded.

Most people are aware of déjà vus. The sceptics will say that déjà vu is coincidence or a trick of the brain. Apart from one exception where there is a faulty neurological function, the déjà vu stems from a dream.

Those who have actually seen clearly that the déjà vu is based on a dream are very fortunate, for they can understand from EXPERIENCE that dreams do indeed come true and that those who speculate otherwise are speaking in ignorance.

When you have had this déjà vu experience and realised that it stemmed from a dream it is a sign of spiritual awakening. In time you will discover that dreams are the blue print for your life and that everything is planned for you and that there is really nothing else to be done but to enjoy the 'ride'. What I am about to reveal now is the most open secret of life which many fail to discover because they are engrained in the brain wash of western scientific prejudice.

I have made a lifelong study of the future factor of dreams and found that ALL dreams are about the FUTURE. At the beginning of our AWAKENING to this fact we can only see those dreams come true that manifest literally, those which are coming true as you have dreamt them, in short, those that manifest as DÉJÀ VUS.

As you focus more on this phenomenon, you will see that dreams are the basis of all PSYCHIC PERCEPTION. They are the cause not only of DÉJÀ VU, but also of PREMONITIONS, of INTUITION, INSTINCT and ALL PSYCHIC PHENOMENA as well. The difference between these and the DÉJÀ VU is that you have no recollection of the dream that told you what would happen or where an IDEA or INSPIRATION or PREMONITION etc. came from.

I said ALL dreams come true, but only few in the way we see it happen in the dream. Those we miss coming true have come true in a figurative or METAPHORICAL manner.

Example: you may dream that you are sailing on a cloud through the skies. When you wake up you won't of course fly up there, but instead you will FEEL AS IF you were up there sailing through the clouds. And if you were asked how you felt on the day of this dream, you would most likely say: "I AM ON CLOUD NINE!"

We are so used to metaphors in our daily speech that we don't even realise that we use them constantly. We take them for granted but when the dream uses them we find it 'weird'. Just look at some oft the daily metaphors we use in waking life such as: He stabbed me in the back, he is a pain in the neck, she is caught in a vice, he is weak kneed, he shot himself in the foot, you haven't got a leg to stand on, he has fallen in love... FALLEN?? Why do we say FALLEN? Do we mean this literally or metaphorically? The latter of course and so does the dream with all of its metaphors.

Once you learn the language of the dream you will realise that we are in the hands of a power that is much grater than our little selves. Once you have realised deeply that dreams are your PROMPTERS at the footlights of the THEATRE OF LIFE, you will learn to resign to that Power that knows all and IS all.

Indeed, you will understand that you are not separate from that Power. You will also see that TIME IS AN ILLUSION. You will comprehend then that when we are awake we are governed by that part of the brain that slows everything down to a step by step perception of reality, and you will also see that when we are asleep and dream that another part of the brain is at work; one that allows you to see some distance into the future, one in which the barriers of time have broken down to a certain extent.

One of the best pieces of evidence that time is illusory and has different speeds is the Near Death Experience during which many persons in the grips of dying see their whole life passing before their eyes on 'fast forward' at such a high speed that it only takes minutes to cover an entire life experience in the tiniest details.

With this in mind you realise that THE BRAIN HAS THREE BASIC ‘GEARS’: The first ‘gear’ being the waking gear where things move slowly moment by moment with the future remaining totally hidden.

The second ‘gear’ is the dream gear. There time and space are contracted like the information in a zip program for the computer. Once unscrambled on the ‘desktop’ it will reveal facts and events of the future.

The third gear is the ‘fast-forward’ gear that comes into action as you approach death.

There is also a fourth slot for your gears stick: ‘NEUTRAL’.

This neutral position is the most difficult to grasp. Only the mystical experience will open up the brain to that most incomprehensible of all ‘gears’. I called it ‘neutral’ because it is open to all directions simultaneously: you experience past, present and future in one instant. It is the supreme evidence that time is an illusion.

I am appending the most recent witness to this phenomenon; one who has taught the modern world all about dreams and psychology. He is Dr. Carl Jung. Here is what he said about this ‘neutral gear’: “We shy away from the word ‘eternal’, but I can describe the experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which present, past and future are one…How can I imagine that I exist simultaneously the day before yesterday, today, and the day after tomorrow? … The only thing that feeling could grasp would be a sum, an iridescent whole, containing all at once expectation of a beginning, surprise at what is now happening, and satisfaction or disappointment with the result of what happened. One is interwoven into an indescribable whole and yet observes it with complete objectivity.”
(Page 327; C. G. Jung Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Collins, ‘The Fontana Library’.)

This experience shows that we, who have not had it, are simply split personalities, split into the dreamers and ‘wakers’. And the ultimate purpose of studying and interpreting dreams is to realise that we are split and that the dream is ultimately the rainbow bridge to total integration of the SELF.


(A personal view)

WHERE DOES OUR EARTH STAY IN THE UNIVERSE?

WHERE DOES OUR EARTH STAY IN THE UNIVERSE?

The solar system is made up of the Sun, the 9 planets and their
// Call the moon count function defined in the document head
print_moon_count('entire solar system');
169 known moons, asteroids, comets, dust and gas. The planets, asteroids, and comets travel around the Sun, the center of our solar system.
Most of the bodies in the solar system travel around the Sun along nearly circular paths or orbits, and all the planets travel about the Sun in the anticlockwise direction (when viewed from above).
Solar system formation began billions of years ago, when gases and dust began to come together to form the Sun, planets, and other bodies of the solar system.

If we see inside the earth, it looks very big beyond to our thinking. but if we look outside the earth, it looks endless beyond to our existence where the earth does'nt look atleast like a particles among uncountable particles of the universe. Just see them....

...Ravi

Indian Currency: A Mind Blowing Information

Mind Blowing Information of Indian Currency

Here’s some photos of currencies that will disclose all the internal information how to recognize that one currency note is valid and not jolly. Please look carefully and be alert for your prosperities

...Ravi

PALM READING: SOME HINTS

PALM READING: SOME HINTS

Heart Line
Placement: Upper Palm
The heart line runs horizontally across the upper part of your palm.



Heart Line
Basic Heart Line Meanings:
• Long Line: Idealistic, Dependent on partner
• Short Line: Self-centered
• Deep Line: Stressful
• Faint Line: Sensitive Nature, Weak Heart
• Straight Line: Intense Feelings
• Curved Line: Intellectual Bent
• Broken Line: Troubled relationships
• Chained Line: Intertwined relationships, Karmic relationships
• Forked Line: Heartbreak, Divorce
• Absent Line: Ruthlessness, Logic rules the heart


Head Line
Placement: Middle of the Palm
The head line represents intellect and reasoning.


Head Line
Basic Head Line Meanings:
• Long Line: Ambitious
• Short Line: Intelligent, Intuitive
• Deep Line: Excellent Memory
• Faint Line: Poor Memory
• Straight Line: Materialistic
• Broken Line: Disappointment
• Chained Line: Mental Confusion
• Forked Line: Career Change
• Double Line: Talented, Inspired by a Muse
• Absent Line: Laziness, Mental Imbalance


Life Line
Placement: Mid to Lower Palm
The life line begins somewhere between your thumb and index finger and runs downward toward wrist. Life line is generally curved.


Basic Life Line Meanings:
• Long Line: Good Health, Vitality
• Short Line: It is a myth that a short life line means a short life. If the life line is short, look closer to other signs (broken, deep, faint, etc.)
• Deep Line: Smooth Life
• Faint Line: Low energy
• Broken Line: Struggles, Losses
• Chained Line: Multiple Walks (meaning that your life path is multifold)
• Forked Line: Various meanings depending on fork placement on the hand. Generally forks indicate diversion or life change. Although they can also mean scattered or split energies.
• Double Line: Partner with Soul Mate, or there is someone near (friend or family member) that serves as a guardian or caretaker.
• Absent Line: Anxious, Nervous


Fate Line
Also called "Destiny"
Placement: Center of Palm, vertical or slanted line divides the palm in half

Fate Line
Basic Meaning of Fate Line
• Absent Line: Preplanned Life
• Deep Line: Inheritance
• Faint Line: Failures, Disappointments
• Forked Line: Conflict or Dual Destiny
• Jagged Line: Struggle, Indecisiveness
• Broken Line: Trauma, Difficult Circumstance
• Chained Line: Highs and Lows


Fame Line
Success, Wealth, Talent
Placement: Parallels Fate Line

Fame Line
Fame line gives light to the a person's fate or destiny, indicating brilliance or artistic ability enhances life purpose. Note: This line is not always present.


Love Lines
Also called "Marriage Lines"
Love lines are short horizontal lines found on the side of the hand underneath the pinky.


Love Lines
Love lines indicate the number of significant relationships there are in a lifetime. Sometimes it is easier to see these lines if you bend your pinky slightly toward your palm to see the line creases.


Children Lines
Placement: Vertical lines between pinky fingers
Children lines commonly root out of marriage lines (Love Lines) indicating births that are a result of corresponding relationships.


Children Lines


Intuition Line
Placement: Parallel to Life Line (either side)
Intuition lines generally shadow the life line because intuition indicates keen insight into one's life.

Intuition Line
Basic Intuition Line Meaning:
The more prominent this line appears (deeper, longer) the stronger the indication that psychic ability is a dominant characteristic for the person. Intuition lines are not the easiest to detect, and may be absent entirely.


Health Line
Placement: Vertical line begins below ring finger
An absent health line usually indicates that health is not an issue. Degree of sickness is indicated by the strength or weakness of this line.

Health Line


Bracelets
Also called "Rascettes"
Placement: Bracelets are the lines at the bend of your inner wrist.

It is most common to have two or three bracelets. Although, some people have only one bracelet, and having four or more is possible. More bracelets indicate a longer life, broken bracelets indicate ill health or lowering of chi energies (It's the basic circulating energy of life).


Travel Lines
Placement: Mid to Lower Palm Underneath Pinky Finger
Travel lines indicate travel, but can also merely indicate a desire to travel.

Travel Lines
Girdle of Venus
Placement: Semi-circle between index and pinky fingers
The shape of the Girdle of Venus is similar to a crescent moon hanging over the heart line. This palm line configuration intensifies the emotions.


Girdle of Venus appears on the hands of individuals who tend to be ultra-sensitive. Symbolically it can indicate a need for shielding or creating emotional boundaries.

...Ravi

Inventors of the Modern Computer

Inventors of the Modern Computer

FORTRAN - The First Successful High Level Programming Language - Invented by John Backus and IBM

Inventors of the Modern Computer Series
• Table of Contents • Next Chapter Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce - Integrated Circuit ENTER
More on FORTRAN and John Backus
• Further Reading on FORTRAN Biography of John Baccus and the Fortran team, information on Fortran and programming in Fortran, HTML version Of Fortran 77, free Fortran software. • FORTRAN : The Early Turning Point The history of software and software programmers. • Software Innovations
By Mary Bellis
"I really didn't know what the hell I wanted to do with my life...I said no, I couldn't. I looked sloppy and disheveled. But she insisted and so I did. I took a test and did OK." - John Backus on interviewing for IBM.
FORTRAN or formula translation, the first high level programming language, was invented by John Backus for IBM, in 1954, and released commercially, in 1957. It is still used today for programming scientific and mathematical applications. Fortran began as a digital code interpreter for the IBM 701 and was originally named Speedcoding. John Backus wanted a programming language closer to human language, which is the definition of a high level language, other high language programs include Ada, Algol, BASIC, COBOL, C, C++, LISP, Pascal, and Prolog.
The first generation of codes used to program a computer, was called machine language or machine code, it is the only language a computer really understands, a sequence of 0s and 1s that the computer's controls interprets as instructions, electrically. The second generation of code was called assembly language, assembly language turns the sequences of 0s and 1s into human words like 'add'. Assembly language is always translated back into machine code by programs called assemblers.
The third generation of code, was called high level language or HLL, which has human sounding words and syntax (like words in a sentence). In order for the computer to understand any HLL, a compiler translates the high level language into either assembly language or machine code. All programming languages need to be eventually translated into machine code for a computer to use the instructions they contain.
John Backus headed the IBM team of researchers, at the Watson Scientific Laboratory, that invented Fortran. On the IBM team were the notable names of scientists like; Sheldon F. Best, Harlan Herrick (Harlan Herrick ran the first successful fortran program), Peter Sheridan, Roy Nutt, Robert Nelson, Irving Ziller, Richard Goldberg, Lois Haibt and David Sayre. The IBM team didn't invent HLL or the idea of compiling programming language into machine code, but Fortran was the first successful HLL and the Fortran I compiler holds the record for translating code for over 20 years. The first computer to run the first compiler was the IBM 704, which John Backus helped design.
Fortran is now over forty years old and remains the top language in scientific and industrial programming, of course it has constantly been updated. The invention of Fortran began a $24 million dollar computer software industry and began the development of other high level programming languages, Fortran has been used for programming video games, air traffic control systems, payroll calculations, numerous scientific and military applications and parallel computer research. John Backus won the 1993 National Academy of Engineering's Charles Stark Draper Prize, the highest national prize awarded in engineering, for the invention of Fortran.

BASIC Language:

BASIC (standing for Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was written (invented) in 1963, at Dartmouth College, by mathematicians John George Kemeny and Tom Kurtzas as a teaching tool for undergraduates. BASIC has been one of the most commonly used computer programming languages, a simple computer language considered an easy step for students to learn before more powerful languages such as FORTRAN.
BASIC's popularity was spread by both Paul Allen and William Gates, in 1975. Gates and Allen (both Microsoft founding fathers) wrote a version of BASIC for the Altair personal computer. It was the first product Microsoft sold. Later Gates and Microsoft wrote versions of BASIC for the Apple computer, and IBM's DOS which Gates provided came with its' version of BASIC.

Integrated Circuit (IC)

illustration from Jack Kilby's inventor's journal
Inventors of the Modern Computer Series
• Table of Contents • Next Chapter Steve Russell and Spacewar - the First Computer Game ENTER
More on Intergrated Circuit - Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce
• Further Reading: The history of integrated circuits, patent drawings, photos, biographies of Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce.
"What we didn't realize then was that the integrated circuit would reduce the cost of electronic functions by a factor of a million to one, nothing had ever done that for anything before" - Jack Kilby
It seems that the integrated circuit was destined to be invented. Two separate inventors, unaware of each other's activities, invented almost identical integrated circuits or ICs at nearly the same time.
Jack Kilby, an engineer with a background in ceramic-based silk screen circuit boards and transistor-based hearing aids, started working for Texas Instruments in 1958. A year earlier, research engineer Robert Noyce had co-founded the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. From 1958 to 1959, both electrical engineers were working on an answer to the same dilemma: how to make more of less.
In designing a complex electronic machine like a computer it was always necessary to increase the number of components involved in order to make technical advances. The monolithic (formed from a single crystal) integrated circuit placed the previously separated transistors, resistors, capacitors and all the connecting wiring onto a single crystal (or 'chip') made of semiconductor material. Kilby used germanium and Noyce used silicon for the semiconductor material.
In 1959 both parties applied for patents. Jack Kilby and Texas Instruments received U.S. patent #3,138,743 for miniaturized electronic circuits. Robert Noyce and the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation received U.S. patent #2,981,877 for a silicon based integrated circuit. The two companies wisely decided to cross license their technologies after several years of legal battles, creating a global market now worth about $1 trillion a year.
In 1961 the first commercially available integrated circuits came from the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. All computers then started to be made using chips instead of the individual transistors and their accompanying parts. Texas Instruments first used the chips in Air Force computers and the Minuteman Missile in 1962. They later used the chips to produce the first electronic portable calculators. The original IC had only one transistor, three resistors and one capacitor and was the size of an adult's pinkie finger. Today an IC smaller than a penny can hold 125 million transistors.
Jack Kilby now holds patents on over sixty inventions and is also well known as the inventor of the portable calculator (1967). In 1970 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. Robert Noyce, with sixteen patents to his name, founded Intel, the company responsible for the invention of the microprocessor, in 1968. But for both men the invention of the integrated circuit stands historically as one of the most important innovations of mankind. Almost all modern products use chip technology.

Programming Language
programming language, syntax, grammar, and symbols or words used to give instructions to a computer.
Sections in this article:
Introduction
Development of Low-Level Languages
Evolution of High-Level Languages
Compilers and Interpreters

Development of Low-Level Languages
All computers operate by following machine language programs, a long sequence of instructions called machine code that is addressed to the hardware of the computer and is written in binary notation (see numeration), which uses only the digits 1 and 0. First-generation languages, called machine languages, required the writing of long strings of binary numbers to represent such operations as “add,” “subtract,” “and compare.” Later improvements allowed octal, decimal, or hexadecimal representation of the binary strings.
Because writing programs in machine language is impractical (it is tedious and error prone), symbolic, or assembly, languages—second-generation languages—were introduced in the early 1950s. They use simple mnemonics such as A for “add” or M for “multiply,” which are translated into machine language by a computer program called an assembler. The assembler then turns that program into a machine language program. An extension of such a language is the macro instruction, a mnemonic (such as “READ”) for which the assembler substitutes a series of simpler mnemonics. The resulting machine language programs, however, are specific to one type of computer and will usually not run on a computer with a different type of central processing unit (CPU).

Evolution of High-Level Languages
The lack of portability between different computers led to the development of high-level languages—so called because they permitted a programmer to ignore many low-level details of the computer's hardware. Further, it was recognized that the closer the syntax, rules, and mnemonics of the programming language could be to “natural language” the less likely it became that the programmer would inadvertently introduce errors (called “bugs”) into the program. Hence, in the mid-1950s a third generation of languages came into use. These algorithmic, or procedural, languages are designed for solving a particular type of problem. Unlike machine or symbolic languages, they vary little between computers. They must be translated into machine code by a program called a compiler or interpreter.
Early computers were used almost exclusively by scientists, and the first high-level language, Fortran [Formula translation], was developed (1953–57) for scientific and engineering applications by John Backus at the IBM Corp. A program that handled recursive algorithms better, LISP [LISt Processing], was developed by John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1950s; implemented in 1959, it has become the standard language for the artificial intelligence community. COBOL [COmmon Business Oriented Language], the first language intended for commercial applications, is still widely used; it was developed by a committee of computer manufacturers and users under the leadership of Grace Hopper, a U.S. Navy programmer, in 1959. ALGOL [ALGOrithmic Language], developed in Europe about 1958, is used primarily in mathematics and science, as is APL [A Programming Language], published in the United States in 1962 by Kenneth Iverson. PL/1 [Programming Language 1], developed in the late 1960s by the IBM Corp., and ADA [for Ada Augusta, countess of Lovelace, biographer of Charles Babbage], developed in 1981 by the U.S. Dept. of Defense, are designed for both business and scientific use.
BASIC [Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code] was developed by two Dartmouth College professors, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, as a teaching tool for undergraduates (1966); it subsequently became the primary language of the personal computer revolution. In 1971, Swiss professor Nicholas Wirth developed a more structured language for teaching that he named Pascal (for French mathematician Blaise Pascal, who built the first successful mechanical calculator). Modula 2, a Pascallike language for commercial and mathematical applications, was introduced by Wirth in 1982. Ten years before that, to implement the UNIX operating system, Dennis Ritchie of Bell Laboratories produced a language that he called C; along with its extensions, called C++, developed by Bjarne Stroustrup of Bell Laboratories, it has perhaps become the most widely used general-purpose language among professional programmers because of its ability to deal with the rigors of object-oriented programming. Java is an object-oriented language similar to C++ but simplified to eliminate features that are prone to programming errors. Java was developed specifically as a network-oriented language, for writing programs that can be safely downloaded through the Internet and immediately run without fear of computer viruses. Using small Java programs called applets, World Wide Web pages can be developed that include a full range of multimedia functions.
Fourth-generation languages are nonprocedural—they specify what is to be accomplished without describing how. The first one, FORTH, developed in 1970 by American astronomer Charles Moore, is used in scientific and industrial control applications. Most fourth-generation languages are written for specific purposes. Fifth-generation languages, which are still in their infancy, are an outgrowth of artificial intelligence research. PROLOG [PROgramming LOGic], developed by French computer scientist Alain Colmerauer and logician Philippe Roussel in the early 1970s, is useful for programming logical processes and making deductions automatically.
Many other languages have been designed to meet specialized needs. GPSS [General Purpose System Simulator] is used for modeling physical and environmental events, and SNOBOL [String-Oriented Symbolic Language] is designed for pattern matching and list processing. LOGO, a version of LISP, was developed in the 1960s to help children learn about computers. PILOT [Programmed Instruction Learning, Or Testing] is used in writing instructional software, and Occam is a nonsequential language that optimizes the execution of a program's instructions in parallel-processing systems.
There are also procedural languages that operate solely within a larger program to customize it to a user's particular needs. These include the programming languages of several database and statistical programs, the scripting languages of communications programs, and the macro languages of word-processing programs.

COBOL :

The word COBOL is an acronym that stands for COmmon Business Oriented Language. As the the expanded acronym indicates, COBOL is designed for developing business, typically file-oriented, applications. It is not designed for writing systems programs. For instance you would not develop an operating system or a compiler using COBOL
COBOL is a high-level programming language first developed by the CODASYL Committee (Conference on Data Systems Languages) in 1960. Since then, responsibility for developing new COBOL standards has been assumed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
Three ANSI standards for COBOL have been produced: in 1968, 1974 and 1985. A new COBOL standard introducing object-oriented programming to COBOL, is due within the next few years.

...Ravi