Public mainframe system

On Apr 18, 2013, at 1:36 PM, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote: It depends on the meaning of "process". The ATM does the front-end job of shoehorning all the data required for the transaction into a transaction request. Then it schleps it to the mainframe, which does what is typically considered the "processing". The ATM then unpacks the response and displays a human-readable result. There are two levels of processing here. The ATM is obviously doing some sort of processing for the front-end work to make it compatible with humans. But it's not doing anything that involves the bank's customer database; that's the job of the mainframe. It's analogous to a web browser in a lot of ways. More so if you consider only non-Javascript stuff, though ATMs these days certainly have a lot more going on on the front end (like check scanning) than they used to. In any case, while you could consider what a simple web browser does to be "processing", in that model the server does most of the heavy lifting, especially when you're talking about CGI type applications. I suppose it comes down to colloquialisms. - Dave