Cobol is one of the oldest third generation languages. It was developed in 1959 (around the same time as Fortran) to replace processor specific assembly languages (second generation languages). The first ANSI standard was the 68 standard (although it had been commonly used since 1961). Later standards were the 74 standard and the 85 standard. Most Cobol programs used today conform to the 85 standard (and so does Tiny Cobol).
Cobol's main advantages over competing languages (such as C) was the fast input/output speed it could deliver, fixed-point arithmetic for accurate accounting, and English-like syntax for documentation and readability. This made it very useful for large data-processing jobs such as keeping track of a million bank accounts each night or processing pay slips. The English-like syntax made programs easier to understand, so business programs could be easily modified over their lifetime as business rules changed.
Cobol is significantly different from block structured languages such as Pascal, C and C's descendants. It has no block structure and thus no way of hiding variables; there is more freedom in the program typing; numbers are closer to human arithmetic e.g. fixed point or decimal numbers are generally used instead of floating point; I/O is record orientated, not stream orientated; recursion is not allowed and the language itself is much larger because it doesn't use libraries.
More information on Cobol can be found at the Cobol FAQ at http://www.cobolreport.com/faqs/cobolfaq.htm
Traditionally the sort of people who use Free software are not the sort of people who use Cobol. This is what The Jargon File has to say on the subject:
COBOL /koh'bol/ n. [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] (Synonymous with evil.) A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by card wallopers to do boring mindless things on dinosaur mainframes. Hackers believe that all COBOL programmers are suits or code grinders, and no self-respecting hacker will ever admit to having learned the language. Its very name is seldom uttered without ritual expressions of disgust or horror. One popular one is Edsger W. Dijkstra's famous observation that "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."
Pretty harsh criticism indeed. But to counter this are good reasons why Cobol is relevant today.
There are about 100 billion lines of Cobol in use today
A great deal of development is still done in Cobol - there are thought to be 1 million developers world wide and 2 billion lines of Cobol written each year
There is considerable demand for Cobol programmers to work on legacy systems
Many university courses teach Cobol
You might disagree with the author of The Jargon File
So if Cobol is still relevant today that means it will be relevant to a good many Free software users and that means it is both useful and important for there to be a Free Cobol compiler.
Which is where Tiny Cobol comes in. It's creation is headed by Rildo Pragana and was first made for the restrictive environment of DOS. Tiny Cobol is now made for the much more programmer friendly environment of Linux and has advanced a long way.
Cobol for GCC, is a project to develop a Cobol compiler which will integrate with the GNU Compiler Collection, GCC. It is not yet in a useful state.