Appeal No. 96-0303
Application 08/056,718
The examiner states that Rust’s stored names are
inherently converted to and stored in numeric format as
required by the claims on appeal. Appellant disagrees. We
agree with Appellant.
The claims require a memory means that stores data items
in encoded (alphanumeric) form, means for converting each of
those alphanumeric data items into numeric characters, and
means for storing the numeric version of each data item.
Rust does not say how the database is arranged in memory.
Rust must have a memory means for storing data items in
alphanumeric form, and some means of correlating letters with
numbers. That does not mean that Rust inherently converts and
stores each and every alphanumeric item into a numeric version
as recited. One skilled in the art would assume that Rust
does not convert and store all the data items in numeric form.
The examiner is incorrect to assume that Rust inherently
must convert each alphanumeric database item into numeric
format for storage. Rust could instead convert each numeric
search term into the possible alphabetic forms and search for
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Last modified: November 3, 2007