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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“It may be well to remember that the highest level of moral aspiration recorded in history was reached by a few ancient Jews—Micah, Isaiah, and the rest—who took no count whatever of what might not happen to them after death. It is not obvious to me why the same point should not by and by be reached by the Gentiles.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)