Appeal No. 1996-3083
Application 08/139,692
under the rejection of the claims under 35 U.S.C. § 102. As
appellants correctly point out at pages 12 and 13 of the
brief, inherency requires much more than probabilities or
possibilities. The examiner has not shown to us that
branching between program modules or “softblocks” within Brown
occurs in a manner recited in independent claims 9 and 14 on
appeal. Inherency requires an asserted thing to be
necessarily inherent and not merely possibly inherent.
The general showings in Figures 3, 8, and 11 of the
interconnectability of the various tasks within each protocol
conversion module are essentially linear in nature and do not
show any branching between them. The examiner admits as much
at page 5 of the Answer. On the other hand, even if the
examiner is correct in observing that Figures 6 and 7 of Brown
do appear to show that branching does occur within each
program module, we do not agree with the examiner's conclusion
that on the basis of these two figures branching would have
been a necessarily inherent part or it would have been obvious
to the artisan to have implemented branching between program
modules or softblocks. At the level of disclosure of Brown
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