Appeal No. 96-3763
Application 07/946,509
Dependent claims 20, 27 and 34 all require, within
the message header generation means, a “means for maintaining
selected ones of the plurality of data fields constant for
each said selected data message to a coupled network input
port.” The examiner has not addressed this limitation in the
statement of and/or rationale for the rejection. In fact, the
examiner never addresses this limitation until the penultimate
page of the answer wherein the examiner states, in toto, that
the examiner disagrees with appellants’ argument that this
limitation was not addressed
because Filepp shows the use of controlling
the length of the data fields as being
variable or fixed (e.g. col. 57, lines 50-
52,
col. 58, lines 28-50). Also, Takada shows
the use of the bridge controlling and main-
taining fixed length data blocks to be sent
across the backbone network (e.g. col. 33,
lines 41-45).
While it is true that these citations refer to “fixed” (i.e.,
“constant”) portions of data fields which obviously may be
“selected” in some manner, it is unclear to us how such2
2We note that while appellants filed a reply brief, there
is no argument therein contesting the examiner’s identifica-
tion, in the prior art, of “maintaining selected ones of the
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