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Introduction
Commercial usage of computer dates back to a little over 50 years. This brief period can be roughly divided into mainframe, PC, and post-PC eras of computing. The mainframe era was marked by expensive computers that were quite unaffordable by individuals, and each computer served a large number of users. The PC era saw the emergence of affordable desktops that could be used by individual users. The post-PC era is seeing the emergence of small and portable computers, and computers embedded in everyday applications, making an individual interact with several computers everyday.
In the first two computing eras, real-time and embedded computing applications were rather rare and restricted to a few specialized applications such as space ...
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