History
Batch processing has been associated with mainframe computers since the earliest days of electronic computing in the 1950s. There were a variety of reasons why batch processing dominated early computing. One reason is that the most urgent business problems for reasons of profitability and competitiveness were primarily accounting problems, such as billing. Billing is inherently a batch-oriented business process, and practically every business must bill, reliably and on-time. Also, every computing resource was expensive, so sequential submission of batch jobs on punched cards matched the resource constraints and technology evolution at the time. Later, interactive sessions with either text-based computer terminal interfaces or graphical user interfaces became more common. However, computers initially were not even capable of having multiple programs loaded into the main memory.
Batch processing is still pervasive in mainframe computing, but practically all types of computers are now capable of at least some batch processing, even if only for "housekeeping" tasks. That includes UNIX-based computers, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X (whose foundation is the BSD Unix kernel), and even smartphones, increasingly. Virus scanning is a form of batch processing, and so are scheduled jobs that periodically delete temporary files that are no longer required. E-mail systems frequently have batch jobs that periodically archive and compress old messages. As computing in general becomes more pervasive in society and in the world, so too will batch processing.
Read more about this topic: Batch Processing
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—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)