Olympic medal Altius, Fortius" features on four Winter Games medals but does not appear on any Summer Games medal. For three events in a row, hosts of the Winter Games included different materials in the medals: glass (1992), sparagmite (1994), and lacquer (1998). It was not until the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China that a Summer Olympic host chose to use something different, in this case jade. While every Summer Olympic medal except for the 1900 Games has been circular, the shapes of the Winter Games have been considerably more varied. The Winter Games medals are also generally larger, thicker, and
FASTER (software) FASTER (software) FASTER (First Automated Teleprocessing Environment Reponder) was a transaction processor that ran on IBM mainframe systems under OS/MFT. FASTER was available from IBM and designed for rapid, low to medium volume online processing. This process was entirely interactive (screen-oriented using 2260 display terminals). The 'official' version of FASTER was single thread only and was a forerunner of MTCS before it was released. A FASTER transaction is a set of operations which together perform a task. Usually, the majority of transactions are relatively simple tasks such as updating the balance of an account. FASTER applications comprise transactions which were