The principles of hardware construction, features of operating systems, programming, debugging and testing, as well as issues of operation of physical object control systems are described. When considering operating systems, attention is drawn to elements of particular importance for real-time systems: task scheduling and synchronization, interrupt organization and time counting. Programming of real-time control tasks is briefly discussed. Provides information on the debugging methodology and operating characteristics of such systems. For the preparation of bachelors in computer science and computer engineering, it will be useful to masters, as well as specialists in automated control systems and information processing.