The scope of ABAP has developed as the software landscape has developed. It has been periodically updated (for example, with object-oriented language instructions).

ABAP was developed in the 1980s from research which produced a whole series of fourth-generation languages which were application-specific and aimed at the high-level production of reports. It was bundled with the SAP R/2 product which was used to provide mainframe business applications to large corporations for materials management and financial and management accounting.

Early on ABAP included the concept of Logical Databases, LDBs, providing a high level of abstraction from the basic database level.

Interestingly, the original users of the ABAP programming language were supposed to be users, who could manipulate the data themselves, but the 4GL turned out to be too complex for ordinary users. It was found that the language needed programmers to manipulate it, as a high skill level was still required. As performance considerations lessened, the 4GL could become a central component of the SAP system.

In the 1990s, SAP started to convert all the key functional code in SAP R/3 to ABAP, so that by the year 2001, the SAP project relied on ABAP for all but the most basic of functions.