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:
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”
—Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)
“Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)