Audiographics conferencing arrangement

An arrangement for establishing an audiographics conference connection among a plurality of telephone station sets and associated data terminals served by a communication system having a common bus, said telephone station sets and associated data terminals having access to said common bus via respective port circuits, said arrangement comprising;

• a data bridge having a plurality of port circuits, each of said port circuits having access to said common bus;
• means for establishing with respect to said common bus a plurality of time slots, each time slot defining a period of time in which a signal may be placed onto said bus by any one of said port circuits and obtained from said bus by one or more other port circuits;
• means responsive to a request inputted by a user at one of said data terminals for establishing a communication path between said one data terminal and said data bridge by assigning respective time slots to said one data terminal and one of said data bridge port circuits;
• means responsive to receipt of a first series of individual requests respectively identifying the telephone station set associated with said one data terminal and other ones of said telephone station sets for establishing a conference connection among said identified station sets by assigning respective time slots to said station sets as they are identified,
• means responsive to receipt of a second series of individual requests for establishing a communication path between each of the data terminals associated with said other station sets and respective ones of a group of data bridge ports by assigning respective time slots to those data terminals and said ones of said data bridge ports, said first and second series of individual requests being inputted by said user, and
• means operative for allocating to each of said data terminals as they are connected to said data bridge a group of logical channels for use in exchanging respective categories of messages, said messages being indicative of respective categories of information displayed on said data terminals.