[ih] Fwd: History of "accounts"

[johnl at iecc.com (John Levine)]

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.

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