BESYS was an early computing environment originally implemented as a batch processing

Batch processing

Batch processing is execution of a series of programs on a computer without manual intervention.Batch jobs are set up so they can be run to completion without manual intervention, so all input data is preselected through scripts or command-line parameters...

 operating system in 1957 at Bell Labs

Bell Labs

Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

 for the IBM 704

IBM 704

The IBM 704, the first mass-produced computer with floating point arithmetic hardware, was introduced by IBM in 1954. The 704 was significantly improved over the IBM 701 in terms of architecture as well as implementations which were not compatible with its predecessor.Changes from the 701 included...

 computer. The initial version of the system BESYS2 was created by George Mealy and Gwen Hansen with Wanda Lee Mammel and utilized IBM's FORTRAN and North American

North American

North American generally refers to an entity, people, group, or attribute of North America, especially of the United States and Canada together.-Culture:*North American English, a collective term used to describe American English and Canadian English...

's symbolic assembly program (SAP) programming languages. It was designed to efficiently deal with a large number of jobs originating on punched card

Punched card

A punched card, punch card, IBM card, or Hollerith card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions...

s and producing results suitable for printing on paper and punched cards. The system also provided processing capabilities for data stored on magnetic tape

Magnetic tape

Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic. It was developed in Germany, based on magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and play back audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape recorders...

s and magnetic disk storage units. Typically punched card and print processing was handled off line by peripheral IBM Electronic Accounting Machines, IBM 1401

IBM 1401

The IBM 1401 was a variable wordlength decimal computer that was announced by IBM on October 5, 1959. The first member of the highly successful IBM 1400 series, it was aimed at replacing electromechanical unit record equipment for processing data stored on punched cards...

 computers and eventually direct coupled computers.

Internal use

BESYS was used extensively by many departments of Bell Labs for over a decade. It was made available through the SHARE

SHARE (computing)

SHARE Inc. is a volunteer-run user group for IBM mainframe computers that was founded in 1955 by Los Angeles-area IBM 701 users. It evolved into a forum for exchanging technical information about programming languages, operating systems, database systems, and user experiences for enterprise users...

 organization to others without charge or formal technical support.

BESYS versions

Versions of the BESYS environment (BESYS3, BESYS4, BESYS5, BESYS7 and BE90) were implemented as the underlying computers transitioned through the IBM 709X family and IBM System/360 Models 65 and 67 computers. Throughout this period the head of the BESYS development project was George L. Baldwin. In the 1960's, when Bell Labs sought to transition to a more advanced time sharing environment, principles and experience from this project loosely influenced the development of Multics

Multics

Multics was an influential early time-sharing operating system. The project was started in 1964 in Cambridge, Massachusetts...

.

Reference

Drummond, R. E., "BESYS revisited", 1987 Proceedings of the National Computer Conference, afips, pp 805-814