International Business Machines Corporation

Edward John Rowlance

William Frederick Berg

John David Dietel

David G Wenz

Patrick James Christenson

Robert J Hart

David C Naatz

At the most general level, the I/O framework mechanism of the present invention is made up of three interdependent controllers. These controllers are referred to herein as the hardware resource administrator, the information controller, and the device controller. The hardware resource administrator is responsible for organizing information about I/O devices and for making the organized information available to the other controllers. The information controller is responsible for gathering information about I/O devices and for changing and/or updating certain I/O device information. Accordingly, the information controller is made up of individual objects that each represent the characteristics of a particular I/O device. The device controller is responsible for controlling the actual operation of the individual devices, and for performing statistical and diagnostic analysis on the individual I/O devices.

Object-oriented I/O device interface framework mechanism

A central processor holds a word-processing program and an entire document to be processed. A smaller I/O processor, connected to the central processor and to an interactive display, holds code for some functions of the word processor, and holds a part of the document. As an operator performs editing tasks at the display, the I/O processor performs locally those functions involving only the document part it holds. When additional document text is required to complete a function, the central processor performs that part of the function involving the additional text.

Sharing word-processing functions among multiple processors

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New Philadelphia, OH, United States of America

Edward John Rowlance