A Personal Exploration of Digital History

Though I was initially thrilled with the opportunity  to learn about the history of the Internet via this video, I soon found myself disappointed and quite a bit confused. For the more tech-savvy student, this overview may seem perfectly adequate. However, after several times watching the same eight minutes of video, I was left with one downright trivial concern: what the  in the hell is batch processing? My poor technology challenged brain was struggle very much with why something would be named batch processing if it only works on processing one task at a time.

Why is it called batch processing if it is only processing one task at a time?

As any college student would do, I began my research on a respectable website by the name of Wikipedia. According to the intro on this page, batch processing is where “input data are collected into batches of files and are processed in batches by the program.” In my mind, this is clearly in conflict with the video’s explanation of batch processing, which suggest that only  one item is processed at a time and not an entire batch. However, fearing that my professors may actually be right about the perils of Wikipedia, I trekked forward through many sources and search results containing far more technical jargon than I was comfortable with, all of which also seemed to be off-topic (and mostly about processing multiple sets credit card information). And then, continuing with my  hope for a video that saves me from the painstaking task of searching through blocks of text for the answer I want and/or need, I found this video:

A New Flicker of Hope Extinguished 

Problems:

1. This guy has distracting facial hair.
2. They didn’t even bother to use a background other than a dimly lit white wall.
3. They are advertising some sort of service I don’t understand.
4. This video, at least to me, seems unrelated.

My conclusions? Wikepedia is not a legitimate source (yes, I am agreeing withmy professors here) and the sources (where the above video was found) somethimes do not even help support the article. Additionally, I still have no idea why the process is called batch processing if it is only supposed to process one item at a time.

Is this inquiry useless to you? Possibly. In fact, probably. (After all, I just tricked you into watching a 4:41 video simply by embedding it and making it seem important.) I just want to know that someone out there is just as confused as I am as to what batch processing is and why it dawns that name and what it means.

This entry was posted on September 3, 2012 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.