@liaizon I was widely taught about offline processing in high school (lots of data was entered offline and sent to punched cards and spools of tape, and those were physically collected and processed in batches on a computer which could be some distance away).

This is still used to some extent even today, its why if you want to change your car registration details in Britain you still have to do them during daytime to early evening as the systems are locked off from data changes after about 1900 whilst the batch processes are run..