International Business Machines Corporation

Gerald I Findley

David T Wang

Stephen Gouze Luning

Wellington C Yu

Everett T Eiselen

John R Disbrow

Terry A Torr

John F Fedak

A working data store simultaneously serves as a FIFO buffer and operating memory. A portion of the FIFO buffer is reallocated for use as an operating memory as processing needs arise.

Method and apparatus which allows the working storage to be reconfigured

Image or character data in the form of a rectangular array of binary 1s and 0s (bits) are divided into a plurality of segments, such as thirty-two by thirty-two bit segments or one bit by eight bit or byte segments. The image data is scanned for identifying all-zero segments (background) which are ignored and non-zero segments (foreground) which are transmitted or stored with offset and length (number of successive non-zero segments). The compacted image data is suitably indexed for facilitating image expansion using simple techniques. All compaction and decompaction machine operations are independent of bit-significant informational content of the segments. Presentation of the uncompacted data uses any printer or display type of device.

Compaction and decompaction of non-coded information bearing signals

Page modification method in a printer subsystem of the partial page

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Tucson, AZ, United States of America

Gerald I Findley