Because the author is lost in peculiarities of the systems he happens to work with that he is redefining the terms (see all the discussion around "push" and "pull"). That's gonna run into this problem.
His problem is one of data transfer and a better fit for what hes looking for is probably "polling" versus "interrupt" driven.
Interrupts are a hardware feature on CPUs. You could have software that is effectively checking for events on each tick (clock cycle), and emulates interrupts. But that's what polling is.
His problem is one of data transfer and a better fit for what hes looking for is probably "polling" versus "interrupt" driven.