[ih] Fwd: History of "accounts"

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 09/02/2014 16:42, John Levine wrote:
> In article <52F63293.3030903 at channelisles.net> you write:
>> Following on from this, the use of "account" in the context of computers 
>> relates to timesharing.
> 
> It's much older than that.  When I was using an OS/360 batch system in
> the mid 1960s, the first card in each job had to identify an account
> so they knew who to charge it to.

It looks as if the first citation for IBSYS/IBJOB is Noble, A.S, Design of an
integrated programming and operating system, IBM Systems Journal 2(2), 1963.
That's behind the IEEE paywall. But that publication date would make it
contemporary with CTSS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBSYS

   Brian


> 
> Poking around on bitsavers, I see that IBSYS could call an accounting
> routine to handle whatever was on the $JOB card, so I expect most
> shops had provision to charge jobs to various accounts.  Back in ye
> olden 1950s before batch processing, I gather that computers were
> typically scheduled by assigning blocks of time to various activities,
> and I expect that they often manually assigned the activites to
> accounts.
> 
> R's,
> John
> 
> 
>