The original computers did not have Operating Systems or a basic environment with some minimal functional capabilities.  People needed some kind of editor, compiler, storage facilities, file management, load programs, run programs, and so forth.  Now we began to see languages evolve, operating systems began to serve diverse goals (Batch long processes possibly using card readers, interactive processing with monitors or workstations, and memory evolving from direct addressing to virtual memory systems.

In batch processing on has computations of some sort that must be completed in a timely fashion but do not require human intervention or attendance.  So let’s say you request money be moved from one institution where you have an account to pay a bill or to another account of your where you need to have more money.  You issue the order request and typically at night the banks look at all of their money transfer orders and process them all, send out confirmations, error summaries, and status notification.  This might be a good example of a batch job.

An interactive job might be a user having to fill out an application for a job or credit card.  They must be at some interactive device connected to the software of the company and sequentially entering in all of the data one field at a time until the form is completed.  This is a reasonable example of an interactive job.