Appeal No. 2003-0422
Application No. 08/818,355 Page 9
Turning to Aldred, we find that Aldred is directed to a
programmable workstation for collaborative working in a network.
Collaborative application support system software 17 is used for
the development of application programs for creating a
collaborative working environment (col. 1, lines 17 and 37-41).
Application Programming Interface (API) 20 allows applications 18
to initiate peer applications and share resources on a variety of
hardware and software platforms located on nodes across diverse
and complex communications networks. API allows defining of
multiple dedicated logical data channels between shared
applications, independently of the structure of the underlying
physical network (col. 4, lines 1-8). A collection of
applications sharing is called a sharing set (col. 5, lines 9 and
10). Individual applications can cease sharing at any time,
withdrawing from a sharing set. As shown in figure 5,
applications in a sharing set such as 40, 41 and 42 can establish
data communication links with one another known as channels.
Channels such as 43 and 44 are logically dedicated and uni-
directional pipes, with application specified transmission
characteristics (col.5, lines 34 and 35, and 40-46). A channel
is always defined by the sending application and it goes from a
sending application to a receiving application. The ends of
channels are known as ports. All channels have one sending port
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