I always enjoyed the rejoinder: "Real-fast is not real-time." 50 years ago, real-time in it's true sense was not a product or service attribute that humanity w

I always enjoyed the rejoinder: "Real-fast is not real-time." 50 years ago, real-time in it's true sense was not a product or service attribute that humanity was much concerned with. Information was disseminated largely via 'latent' methods and the delay between and event and it's report was typically measured in hours at best, and months for people subscribing to magazines. Today, it does matter to an increasing number of people when an event occurred, and their desire to know 'soon' is increasing, because the reach of events has expanded to global extents and and the time we have to react is shrinking. Case in point: I've set a reminder to keep an eye on the Hang Seng in Hong Kong this evening to get an early read on where the NASDAQ will head tomorrow morning. These trends are pushing the term real-time/realtime/real time out of computer jargon and into mainstream where they must be oversimplified and therefore conflated, like so many others. It's the natural evolution of language.