Abstract: A process for compressing data sent to command driven remote video terminals is disclosed. A command string representation of the current contents of the remote terminal's video buffer is maintained locally at the host computer. This command string representation is a sequence of commands, in the terminals command language, that will write the contents of the screen in a manner as expected by the application that originated the transmitted data, if the sequence were sent to the terminal device following an erase/write command. Incoming current command strings are sorted by buffer address order and analyzed and merged with the command string representation of the buffer contents via a very efficient single pass process that provides a new expected state representation, an erase/write command string, and a write command string which expresses only the differences between the current terminal buffer contents and the desired presentation.