57 Disclosed is a selector comprised of one input port and two output ports; the input port has N input data lines and each of the output ports has N output data lines; one circuit in the selector selects only one of the two output ports at a time; and another circuit in the selector passes characters from the input port to the selected output port. Each of the characters is represented by active logic signals on M-out-of-N data lines on the input port, with M being at least two and N being greater than M and greater than three.