Appeal No. 1997-2056
Application No. 08/019,798
a patent. See In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d 1443, 1445, 24 USPQ2d 1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir.
1992). On appeal to the Board, an applicant can overcome a rejection by showing
insufficient evidence of prima facie obviousness or by rebutting the prima facie case with
evidence of secondary indicia of nonobviousness.” In re Rouffet, 149 F.3d 1350, 1355,
47 USPQ2d 1453, 1455 (Fed. Cir. 1998). Here, we find that appellants have overcome
the prima facie case of obviousness by showing insufficient evidence by the examiner of
obviousness. Therefore, we will not sustain the rejection of process claim 17 nor
corresponding apparatus claim 27 which contains the same claim language.
Appellant argues that the Lien patent teaches the storage of the device driver in the
adapter rather than in mass memory in the computer system for input of the device driver
to the RAM of the computer after the computer has been initially booted. (See brief at
page 5.) The examiner acknowledges this deficiency in Lien and relies upon
the teaching of Hughes. Hughes is directed to a networked system where the remote
terminals initially perform booting by interfacing with a controller and downloading relevant
files and drivers from the mass memory of the controller to perform the initial bootstrap
initialization or initial program load. (See answer at pages 3-4 and brief at pages 9-10.)
Therefore, the Hughes reference does not teach or suggest the storage of the device
drivers for retrieval and use after the bootstrap initialization while an application program is
running, as recited in the language of claim 17. (See brief at page 10.) The examiner
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