Appeal No. 96-1119
Application 07/690,176
the monitoring steps of claim 2 could be performed mentally by
a human and the invention of these claims is directed to a
computer program [answer, pages 5-9]. The amendment filed
with the reply brief amended claim 2 to recite that the
monitoring steps were performed by a host computer. Thus, to
the extent that the mental step rejection was appropriate, a
doubtful proposition at best, the examiner’s rejection does
not apply to the claims as amended. The amendment also
amended claim 2 to reflect that the computer program shown in
Figures 5 through 182 was embodied in a tangible memory
medium.
The examiner’s rejection of the claims, which was
based on the belief that the claims were directed to a
computer program, was not appropriate even without the
amendment. Claim 2 was clearly directed to the operations
performed by a computer and not to the computer program per
se. It is not clear to us why the method recited in claim 2
was indicated by the examiner as not belonging to any of the
four statutory classes of
35 U.S.C. § 101. A method is one of those statutory classes.
Additionally, a claim directed to a method performed on a
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