Abstract: Characters are located in a character recognition system by providing images in response to scanning characters, and then smearing black pixels in an image in up and down and left and right directions for detecting corners which are used to produce candidate character frames. These candidate character frames are scored based on how well they correspond to character size and expected location to determine which character frames are to be submitted for character recognition.

Abstract: A port adapter for an input/output system for a large data processing system. The port adapter is coupled to an I/O processor of that system and also to main memory of the system so that when the port adapter is selected by a system interrupt message from the I/O processor, it can begin and carry on its data transmission between a selected peripheral device and main memory without further assistance. The port adapter has two peripheral interface transceivers so that it can concurrently control data transfers to at least two peripheral devices.