Importance

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Abstract

A single CPU within a network printer executes in multiplex a communication task for extracting print job data from a packet received from the network in accordance with the communication protocol, a language task for interpreting the print job data, and a print task for generating raster image to be sent to a print engine on the basis of the result of the interpretation. Further, the CPU includes a watch dog timer (WDT) task which is activated by the communication task. The WDT task operates in a manner that, when the communication task is blocked for a long time due to the busy state of the language task and the print task and can not return a response to the network, the WDT task returns a response of busy to the network before the transmission originator disconnects the connection to the network thereby to maintain the connection, so that a succeeding packet can be received from the transmission originator when the communication task is released from the blocked state later.

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First Claim