Appeal No. 1997-3837
Application No. 08/269,251
answer (Paper No. 13, mailed Apr. 28, 1997) for the examiner's reasoning in support of
the rejections, and to the appellants’ brief (Paper No. 12, filed Jan. 17, 1997) for the
appellants’ arguments thereagainst.
OPINION
In reaching our decision in this appeal, we have given careful consideration to the
appellants’ specification and claims, to the applied prior art references, and to the
respective positions articulated by the appellants and the examiner. As a consequence of
our review, we make the determinations which follow.
Appellants argue that the Schanin reference does not teach or suggest the “means
for requesting control of said system bus, prior to said determining means determining
whether such control is required” as recited in claim 1. We agree with appellants. The
examiner states that Schanin does not teach or suggest this critical feature of the claimed
invention on page 4 of the answer. The examiner maintains that it would have been
obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to request control of the
system bus prior to determining whether control was required “because this feature would
allow for initialization of the commander modules and would allow the commander modules
to interface with the bus and determine whether further access of the bus is required by a
particular command module.” (See answer at page 5.) Appellants argue that the
3
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007