Data Processing; The Data Processing System - IBM 3270 Operator's Manual

Data Processing
Following is a brief description of data processing and of the part you and your
display system equipment play in the data processing of your organization.
First, you must understand that the "data" in "data processing" refers to all the
information or records required by your organization to conduct its business.
This is a lot of information to think about, so, for our discussion, let us con·
sider only the data required for payroll administration, a common part of all
business. The data (information) required to perform this function includes the
mimes of all employees, the number of hours each employee worked, his or
her rate of pay, the number of overtime hours he or she worked (if any), the
amount of money to be withheld, and all other facts needed to pay everyone
the correct amount.
The "processing" in "data processing" refers to all the work involved in accom·
plishing a particular data processing job. In a data processing "payroll" job,
the processing involves providing the host system with the required data,
determining (with the data) each employee's paycheck amount, printing all
the checks, and updating the records.
Putting the two together, then, data processing is the performance of jobs or
tasks by processing the required data.
Although data processing has always been
a
major part of running an organiza·
tion, it has not always been called data processing. Before the development of
the data processing system, almost all processing of data was done by hand.
Today, most of it is done by data processing systems and in much less time
than before.
The Data Processing System
You will be operating a machine that is part of your organization's data process·
ing system. To give you some knowledge of the other machines in that system,
we will now examine the different groups of machines that make up a typical
data processing system. The points discussed will hol4 true even though some
of the machines that are mentioned may not be included in all data processing
systems.
Regardless of the information to be processed or the equipment used, all data
processing systems can be divided into the three basic sections shown in
Figure 1-1: input, processing, and output.
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