A terminal controller for allowing concurrent operations of a plurality of application programs, each said application program using an input/output data stream including an address information for enabling to display data on the overall screen of a terminal enables the outputs from application programs which operate concurrently to be displayed on the split screen of a single terminal linked with said terminal controller. An address conversion is carried out in the terminal controller on at least a portion of the address information in an input data stream input from a terminal and on at least a portion of the address information in an output data stream output from an application program.

A previous ticket is read by a previous ticket reader unit, and the contents of read information are displayed on a CRT display unit, and are modified by departure/destination station information input sections and a condition input section. Thereupon, a new pass is issued by a printer/encoder unit in accordance with the modified information.

A method of operating a distributed processing, interactive computer network is described. The network is designed to provide very large numbers of simultaneous users access to large numbers of applications which feature interactive text/graphic sessions. The network includes one or more servers, interactive applications, and one or more reception systems, the reception systems being capable of communicating with the respective servers and receiving applications from them. In this arrangement, application are structured from packets termed "objects", the objects including the display data and/or program code required to support execution of the application. When a request for an application is received at a reception system, if any objects for the application are unavailable from the reception system, the objects are requested from the server and supplied to the reception systems requesting the application objects. In accordance with the method, the respective reception systems include display interfaces for presenting applications to respective users the respective display interfaces featuring a plurality of display partitions. Also in accordance with the method, at least some of the respective applications are divided into sections, the respective sections being designed to form at least a part of an application display page. Further, application sections are constructed from objects such that display page parts of one or more respective applications may be controllably presented at the partitions of the interface to permit at least application page part nesting, scrolling and navigation, the objects being of multiple types and including display data and/or program code for enabling execution of applications and their presentation at the interface partitions of the respective user reception systems.

A screen display device which displays characters and patterns on a TV screen or other screen having a separate blanking signal output controlled by set data for each character in the display memory. Different displays can be shown on several different screens by controlling a color signal which combines the set data for each character and the set data for each screen.

A display system has a driver program for displaying alphanumeric characters and a driver program for displaying graphics. When a graphics window is opened, a program in the operating system establishes a control block containing a code that has been made unique within the user's program. For operations within a window, a function packet is passed to the appropriate driver. The operations are identified by the unique code and several independent windows can be created.