In data communications, an automatic switching system is a switching system in which all the operations required to execute the three phases of Information transfer transactions are automatically executed in response to signals from a user end-instrument.
In an automatic switching system, the information-transfer transaction is performed without human intervention, except for initiation of the access phase and the disengagement phase by a user.
In telephony, it refers to a telephone exchange in which all the operations required to set up, supervise, and release connections required for telephone calls are automatically performed in response to signals from a calling device. This distinction lost importance as manual switching declined during the 20th century.
Famous quotes containing the words automatic and/or system:
“Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“A person, seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity: while the haughty Dogmatist, persuaded that he can erect a compleat system of Theology by the mere help of philosophy, disdains any further aid, and rejects this adventitious instructor.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)