Hard real-time has a huge amount of uses for the average person. I just made toast -- the software-controlled thermostat in my toaster oven has (slow) hard boun

Hard real-time has a huge amount of uses for the average person. I just made toast -- the software-controlled thermostat in my toaster oven has (slow) hard bounds on its sense-to-control latency to avoid dangerous overheating. Before that, I brushed my teeth -- the brushed motor controller detects a motor stall by increased current if I brush too hard and stall it, shuts down the motor to avoid overheating (with a hard real-time sense-to-actuate constraint), and beeps to inform me. Then I spent some time on HN, with a laptop with PMICs and other microcontrollers that have hard real-time constraints all over the place. By far the majority of my computer interactions so far today have been with computers that have hard real-time constraints, and I haven't even gotten in my car yet!