BESYS

BESYS (Bell Operating System) was an early computing environment originally implemented as a batch processing operating system in 1957 at Bell Labs for the IBM 704 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's symbolic assembly program SAP programming languages. It was designed to efficiently deal with a large number of jobs originating on punched cards and producing results suitable for printing on paper and punched cards. The system also provided processing capabilities for data stored on magnetic tapes and magnetic disk storage units. Typically punched card and print processing was handled off line by peripheral IBM Electronic Accounting Machines, IBM 1401 computers and eventually direct coupled computers.