DaveLembke,
Thanks for your post.
Now, to be serious. Here is what I recall.
The original design of the IBM PC has a real time clock that could give the time and date, if it had been set right. Later a hardware device with a tiny hearing aid cell was used so it would always have the right time.battery was
The system had a hardware interrupt that come on 18.2 times per second. This was about 55 milliseconds. It was drive by hardware independent of the CPU, so even if the CPU was inside a program loop, the interrupt would come and update the time.
Years ago I wrote some assembly programs to read the date and time functions from the system. I also use a BASIC program to control a serial port data feed used in a commercial communications system. Use of the timer in that program was very important. Some old serial port protocols depended on a good way to measure time in fractions of a second.
Anyway, all of this is very old stuff. I comes to me that some will use PING for a timer. The system already has definitions of a hardware timers as part of the hardware and firmware. In fact, that is how PING works.
A micro timer was introduced in Turbo BASIC from Borland.
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_borlandBorsHandbook1987_15768512That was a long time ago.
My recommendation is that if you need a timer in batch, just invoke a bit of code in VBscript. Every Windows system has VBscript already installed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBScriptThe intent here is to help newcomers with using time delays in programming. It is not necessary to re-invent the timer.