Abstract: A data receiver providing an intelligent interface for a hand held computerized data entry terminal to communicate over telephone lines with a host computer. The data receiver has multiple microprocessor control receiver line cards connected to telephone lines and interconnected to interface with the host computer. Each line card includes a system program in a nonvolatile area of memory and a customer application program in volatile area of memory. The data receiver answers the telephone, checks for errors and provides progress tones over the telephone line. When connected to a data entry terminal, the data receiver sets the baud rate, determines the line card protocol, reformats the data in accordance with the customer specifications and hands the data off to the host computer. A remote service computer may be connected to each line card to update the customer application program in the data receiver as well as perform diagnostic and testing routines over the telephone line.

Abstract: A portable handheld battery operated telecommunications terminal (10) is acoustically coupled to a telephone hand set for the transmission and reception of alphanumeric information over ordinary telephone lines. A standard typewriter ASCII keyboard (34) enables the encoding of messages for transmission on a character by character basis (Baudot code) or the entire message to a second communications terminal (10) with the same transmission protocol. A visual display (32) provides a display of data for editing the encoded message prior to transmission and for display of a message received from a second communications terminal (10). A microprocessor (50) is programmed by processor instructions stored in EPROMs (66) and (68) for controlling operation of the communications terminal (10) from entries from the keyboard (34).