Appeal No. 96-2203
Application 08/160,463
relevant teachings of the references to arrive at the claimed invention. See In re Fine, 837
F.2d 1071, 1074, 5 USPQ2d 1596, 1598 (Fed. Cir. 1988).
CLAIMS 1, 3 AND 4
With respect to the rejection of claims 1, 3 and 4, we do not find that the Examiner
has set forth a prima facie case of obviousness in the rejection of claims 1, 3
and 4. The Examiner has set forth that Dorfe does not teach the limitation that the
“computer means is connected by only a single line to first unit of said plurality of units
connected in series.” (See Answer at page 4.) The Examiner states that
the above feature is [sic: was] well known to one of ordinary skill in the art at
the time the invention was made as evidenced by Fadem. The reference to
Fadem teaches the feature in Fig.1. It would be [sic: have been] obvious to
one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was made to modify
the system of Dorfe et al. to implement the above feature of Fadem because
both the prior art systems are analogous to set up I/O device identification,
Dorfe et al. shows serial data transfer mechanism (see Fig. 1, element 22)
and the above feature of Fadem would increase the efficiency and reliability
of the [sic] Dorfe’s system by cutting down extra hardware, i.e., eliminating
extra lines for the control and data and replacing by [sic: with] a twisted pair
(Fig. 1, element 16) . . . . The twisted pair of Fadem can be considered
as a single line.” (See Answer at page 4.)
The Examiner argues that Fadem teaches “daisy chained” connections and it would
have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to
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