Batch processing

Batch processing is the name for the usual manner in which early computers (but not the very earliest) were used (although it continued to exist for a long period afterwards). Time-sharing had not yet been invented, so users generally did not interact directly with 'their' computer in real-time; instead, they gathered up their program and its input data (together usually referred to as a job), and handed the whole thing as a unit over to the computer operator, whose task it was to care for the machine, and 'run' all the jobs submitted to it by users. The submitted jobs formed a queue, and the operator would run them in order, one after the other - hence the name for this manner of using computers.

Although in the very earliest days there were no operating systems, and submitted programs ran on the 'bare metal', subroutine libraries quickly appeared to do such things as perform I/O on behalf of the user; these evolved into batch operating systems, specialized in performing batch processing.