 - Also see real-time clock and real-time operating system.
Real time is a level of computer responsiveness that a user senses as sufficiently immediate or that enables the computer to keep up with some external process (for example, to present visualizations of the weather as it constantly changes). Real-time is an adjective pertaining to computers or processes that operate in real time. Real time describes a human rather than a machine sense of time.
In the days when mainframe batch computers were predominant, an expression for a mainframe that interacted immediately with users working from connected terminals was online in real time.
| CONTRIBUTORS: |
John Huntington |
| LAST UPDATED: |
20 Apr 2006
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