Appeal No. 1997-1984
Application 08/408,127
In reaching our conclusion on the issues raised in this appeal, we have carefully considered
appellants’ specification and claims, the applied patent, and the respective viewpoints of appellants and
the examiner. As a consequence of our review, we are in general agreement with appellants (Brief,
pages 4 to 9) that claims 3 to 6 on appeal would not have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the
art at the time the invention was made in light of the collective teachings of Farrand. However, we are
in agreement with the examiner (final Office action, page 3) that the subject matter of claim 1 on appeal
would have been obvious in light of Farrand, at least to the extent that claim 1 is broadly set forth. For
the reasons which follow, we will reverse the decision of the examiner with respect to claims 3 to 6, and
we will sustain the decision of the examiner with respect to claim 1.
We agree with appellants’ argument (Brief, page 8) that in Farrand there is no relation between
firmware and rebooting. We note that the examiner admits that in Farrand, "[n]ot explicitly disclosed is
the step of the firmware mechanism attempting to reboot the system before reporting the error" (final
Office action, page 3) (emphasis added). Our close review of the Farrand reference, especially column
9, lines 14 to 29, reveals that rebooting of the computer system 22 is done by the remote facility 34 as
opposed to locally by the computer system as in appellants’ claims 3 and 6. Further, in Farrand
rebooting is done by remote console emulation or hard reboot simulation, but no hard reboot can be
performed (see column 9, lines 26 to 28). We cannot agree with the examiner (Answer, page 3) that
Farrand’s disclosure of firmware as performing "alert determination functions" (column 9, lines 47 to
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