One or more programs (together with any data needed) are submitted to the computer as a 'job' and put in a queue to await processing.

There is no interaction between user and computer.

Processing can be done at off-peak times such as overnight, as no interaction is needed.

Example: A job might be a payroll run for a company together with all the time-sheet details of the workers for that week (hours worked, overtime etc).

Example: Electricity bills are produced using a batch processing system. All the meter readings from premises that use electricity are collected together and processed as a batch.

A standalone computer that is not connected to a network.

Unable to communicate with other computers or transfer data, but protected from viruses, hackers etc...

A number of users are connected to a central computer and seemingly have individual control. (Careful...this is not the same as a network.)

The central computer determines which user is waiting for processing (polling). Each user is allocated a time-slice of processing time.

One of the jobs of the operating system is to control the flow of data to and from the workstations. Output needs to be sent back to the correct workstation!

A computer may store a number of different programs in its memory.

Each stored program will receive a time-slice of processing time (typically about 1/50th second) in turn. This happens so fast that it seems that the computer is processing all programs simultaneously.

In practice, most large on-line systems are a mixture of multi-access and multiprogramming systems.

Generally applied to PCs...a number of tasks are loaded and processed in turn for short time-slices until completed. It appears that the computer is running several applications at the same time.

Example : On a PC you can have a number of windows open with different applications running in each.