Appeal No. 1999-0880
Application No. 08/700,610
interpreted as relying on, and responsive to, switch 23 as the
code location pointer since the original disclosure lacks any
reference to software or processor control of the pointer or
to the pointer being part of the processor. At page 6 of the
answer, the examiner states that
[t]here is no indication that the incrementing of
the location pointer in fig. 4 is a separate
software embodiment and this incrementing is
interpreted as controlled by movement of switch 23
to the next position based on the several references
to switch 23 determining the memory location in
appellants’s [sic] disclosure.
While we are not unsympathetic to the examiner’s
reasoning and we are not overly enthralled by appellants’ now
claiming a “processor controlled code location pointer” and
“software controlled code location pointer” in view of the
very meager description of any software and the rather cryptic
descriptions in the flowchart boxes of Figure 3, we must
reverse the rejection of claims 20 through 45 under both 35
U.S.C. § 251 and 35 U.S.C. § 112, first paragraph, because we
believe that Figure 3 does disclose enough to indicate that
the inventors did have in their
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