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Automatic data processing
Overview
Automatic data processing (sometimes abbreviated to ADP) is a discipline of data processing that is performed through techniques and methods by automatic means. It pertains to data processing equipment such as electrical accounting machines and electronic data processing equipment. In telecommunication, there are two branches of automatic data processing worth noting:
1. An interacting assembly of procedures, processes, methods, personnel, and equipment to perform automatically a series of data processing operations on data. The data processing operations may result in a change in the semantic content of the data.
2. Data processing by means of one or more devices that use common storage for all or part of a computer program, and also for all or part of the data necessary for execution of the program; that execute user-written or user-designated programs; that perform user-designated symbol manipulation, such as arithmetic operations, logic operation, or character string manipulations; and that can execute programs that modify themselves during their execution. Automatic data processing may be performed by a stand-alone unit or by several connected units.
See Also
Source
Much of this page came from this entry in Wikipedia.
