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:
“She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)