Possibly - but COBOL was actually very new when some of these tapes were made according to the date range in the article, so there's a high chance (I'd bet on i

Possibly - but COBOL was actually very new when some of these tapes were made according to the date range in the article, so there's a high chance (I'd bet on it) that the tapes are not in COBOL record format. BCD was implemented in the machine language in the IBM machines and so it was widely used prior to COBOL, the CDC machine involved here does not have BCD in its instructions but still provided some support for BCD operations because like many smaller computers of the era these CDCs were often used to pre/postprocess tapes also used with larger IBM machines - in an analogy to more modern architecture, it was not uncommon at the time to 'map' on an IBM mainframe (collect data from other sources, often) and then take the tapes to smaller machines to 'reduce' (totalize, etc). This allowed for using time on the very expensive IBM machines more efficiently.