Data processing apparatus including a peripheral processing complex

As an example of a peripheral processing complex coupled to a central processor, there is disclosed a document distribution terminal which can be required to process large volumes of data. To do this rapidly and efficiently, the terminal (10 to 16) is organized to process all of the data in specialized peripheral devices (12 to 15). The supervising central processing unit (20) controls the terminal but does not perform any data processing. The functions of entering data, scanning documents, encrypting data, compressing data, transceiving data, decompressing data, decrypting data and printing data are all performed in parallel by specialized devices working directly with a shared memory (16). A peripheral processing controller (10) initialized by the central processing unit controls time-shared access to the memory by the specialized devices, incorporates the memory address registers of the devices 12 to 15 and processes the modification of the contents thereof to attain parallel and sequential processing of the data in shared storage by the initialized devices in a mode selected by the central processing unit.