What are batch systems?

Early computers were physically huge machines run from a console. The general input devices were card readers and tape drivers. The common output devices were tape drivers, line printers, and cardpunches. The user didn't interact directly with the computer systems. Somewhat, the user prepared a job which consisted of the data, the program, and some control information about the nature of the job (control cards) - and submitted it to the computer operator .The job was typically in the form of punch cards. The output appeared following some later time (after minutes, hours or days). The output consisted of the end result of the program as well as a dump of the final memory and register contents for the debugging.

-  To accelerate processing, operators batched collectively jobs with similar needs and ran them through the computer as a group. Therefore, the programmers would run off their program with the operator. The operator would arrange programs into batches with similar requirements and as the computer became available, would run each batch. The output from every job would be sent back to the appropriate programmer.