So, I’m sitting at my desk at 7:50 this morning and I hear a delivery truck pull up to the front door of my house. Since this is a pretty regular occurrence around our place, I didn’t even look to see what was going on. After hearing the door of the truck close and the truck started to pull away, I got an email telling me that the package had just been delivered. As I looked out the window I saw the truck just leaving my driveway. For all intents and purposes, I’d call that real-time information.
I presume the process goes something like this:
- Driver scans package with remote scanner
- The package information is sent to truck’s computer via some local protocol
- Delivery advice is transmitted to a central office via some private data network
- The computer at the central office generates an email message which is sent to my server
- My local computer fetches the message from my server
It probably took me longer to open and read the message than it did to complete the steps above. Cool.
