In mainframes and other large enterprise machines, proccessor time is usually divided into two parts, Interactive and batch. A batch proccess is a program or system running autonomous of user control in the sense of a background process or daemon in UNIX terminology.

A batch process is a process which is given a non-interactive priority; generally, they are put in a queue to execute so as to give you the output when it's done. This was how all computing tasks were performed in the good old days, since there weren't any of those newfangled keyboards or mice or displays or anything.