Appeal No. 95-1308
Application 07/999,502
Claim 9 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as being unpatentable over Coale, Chang,
Kaida, Smith, Fukushima, Gaudet, Sein-o, and Sander. The reasons are stated in the Examiner's
Answer, page 10.
OPINION
We reverse.
Appellants argue that the claims stand or fall together as a single group (Brief, page 4) but
also argue the groups separately. It is appellants' position that method claim 12 is "substantially
equivalent to the system claim set forth within Claim 11 as described above" (Brief, page 7) and
should be patentable for the same reasons. It is also appellants' position that dependent claim 9 is
patentable because it depends on claim 12 (Brief, page 8). Accordingly, the claims will be considered
to stand or fall together with representative claim 1.
Coale is directed to a method of detecting and analyzing exception events occurring in a
computer peripheral subsystem connected to a host computer. The method includes maintaining a
Subsystem Environment database comprising information relating to the current configuration of the
computer peripheral subsystem, and usage and error information relating to the peripheral subsystem.
The peripheral subsystem 21 (figure 2) includes four parts: (1) "one or more input/output (I/O)
devices 23 for receiving operation commands and data from the host computer system" (column 3,
lines 57-59) which may be a computer disk file subsystem referred to as a Direct Access Storage
(DAS) subsystem (column 1, lines 13-16); (2) "I/O device internal error detection, determination, and
recovery mechanism 25" (column 3, lines 65-67) which "is typically common for all devices in the
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