Thanks for the quick response. To be specific:

I want to mimic what I've seen on AS/400 based systems. The AS/400 treats each hand held reader as a small terminal. The held held reader has a small display area and communicates to the AS/400 via an Radio Frequency controller. In the PC world each hand held unit would look like another workstation on the network, to draw a direct analogy. Visual Fox would treat the hand held unit like any other work station - but the screen size would be small, and a full gui might not work. The idea is that the interface is real time just like a workstation. I assume that the vendor of the barcode hand held reader would need to provide for the interface - but I'm unfamiliar with specific solutions already in place. The net result is that I have one application that accesses one set of data and communicates with the bard code scanner as if it were a workstation on the network - some limitations due to the size and nature of the display on a hand held scanner.