Appeal No. 95-3125 Application 08/071,920 all the claims in the application. Amendments after final rejection were filed on July 7, 1994 and August 2, 1994. Both of these amendments were entered by the examiner. These amendments resulted in the withdrawal of rejections made under 35 U.S.C. § 112 in the final rejection [advisory action, Paper #8]. The disclosed invention pertains to a control system having a plurality of distributed input/output interface modules. Specifically, information is provided to a plurality of input/output devices by way of a host interface connected to a plurality of secondary interfaces. The host interface and each secondary interface has a hardware controlled multinode interface (HCMI). An address counter in each secondary HCMI directly controls activation of that HCMI. Representative claim 1 is reproduced as follows: 1. In a control system having a plurality of distributed input/output interface modules, comprising a central processing unit (CPU) for controlling information to and from a plurality of input/output devices, a host interface having a host hardware controlled multinode interface (HCMI); 2Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007