Portable communication terminal for remote database query

Abstract From the Canadian patent

A portable terminal suitable for brief queries to a central database can be employed with any available telephone for communication over the public telephone network. Message characters are entered through the keyboard, stored in memory in digitally coded form, and displayed in a display window. A speaker is acoustically coupled to the telephone mouthpiece. After dial-up connection to a host a, stored message is recalled and transmitted: the stored digitally coded data is converted to a code employing unique sequential pairs of standard DTMF tones, provided by a tone generator to the speaker. The message can be composed off-line stored, and, edited using special function keys including …