摘要 |
<p>An enhanced fixed function video display terminal having various features for the efficient transmission of data streams. The video display terminal may have a memory for storing substantially more characters than can be displayed to the operator on the display screen width and length. This permits manipulation of data at document page boundaries, scrolling, etc. One or more extended attribute buffers (312, 314) are added to enable characters to be displayed in a variety of fonts, colors, etc. The data stream from the host computer to the display terminal and from the display terminal to the host computer contains data characters and attribute characters which are interleaved for efficiency in input/output programming. When receiving data, the display terminal has the capability of parsing the data stream into data or attribute characters and adding pad characters to completely fill the display buffers. Similarly, the display terminal interleaves data and attribute characters and compacts the data stream by stripping pad characters when sending data back to the host computer.</p> |