7 Real Time
Reaping the Whirlwind
MOST OF THE computer systems installed in commerce and government during the 1950s and 1960s were used in a pedestrian way. They were simply the electronic equivalents of the punched-card accounting machines they replaced. While computers were more glamorous than punched-card machines, giving an aura of modernity, they were not necessarily more efficient or cheaper. For many organizations, computers did not make any real difference; data-processing operations would have gone on much the same without them. Where computers made a critical difference was in real-time systems.
A real-time system is one that responds to external messages in “real time,” which usually means within seconds, ...
Get Computer, 4th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
