International Business Machines Corporation

Richard P Dachowski

Patrick D Motola

Silous F Clements

Robert Amezcua

An improvement is provided to a text processor having an interactive display terminal. The improvement provides for a combination of said text processor with a data processor and means for conducting data processing sessions utilizing the data processor between text processing sessions carried out by said text processor. During such data processing sessions, the interactive display terminal of said text processor emulates a data processing terminal. The emulated display terminal is connected to the data processor whereby the emulated terminal functions as a display terminal for the data processor. Further, means are provided which are operational during the data processing session to define the outer dimensions of a limited area on the display terminal to correspond to the dimensions of the data processing display terminal screen being emulated. In accordance with a more particular aspect of the disclosure, means are provided in the text processing system for storing data representative of the outlines of a plurality of different data processing display screen to be emulated together with means for selecting one of the plurality of stored outlines to be displayed on the emulated screen.

Emulation of data processing display terminals of variable screen size

A display word processor (11) has the capability of emulating a data processing terminal for a host data processor (10) in an information processing system. With such a capability, the display word processor may be switched between data processing and word or text processing sessions. In this information processing system, the interactive display (17) is operable during data processing sessions to display a word processing message when a word processing task is being carried out as a background task during the data processing session. The word processing message may be displayed on a message line (7) which may be shared with a data processing message. Alternatively, if the interactive display terminal (17') is large enough, the word processing message line (9) may be displayed in an area dedicated to the word processing message.

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Round Rock, TX, United States of America

Richard P Dachowski