Appeal No. 1997-2058
Application No. 08/122,828
35 U.S.C. § 112, PARAGRAPH 2
The examiner rejects the term “the queue” as lacking proper antecedent basis in
claim 18 and appellants maintain that there is proper antecedent basis in the claim.
Appellants argue that the antecedent basis for the term is “the physical disk task list.” (See
brief at page 32.) While the defect in the claim is not a fatal flaw to understanding the
metes and bounds of the claimed invention once explained by appellants, in essence,
appellants admit that the claim lacks particularity in the use of the term “the queue.”
Therefore, we agree with the examiner and will sustain the rejection of claim 18.1
35 U.S.C. § 103
At the outset, we note that we are in general agreement with appellants (brief at
pages 18-22) that the claims 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 teachings of Miro and
Howath. Appellants argue that the prior art references applied against the claims have not
recognized the problem of thrashing where multiple threads, for each disk drive, are
operated concurrently in a multi-partitioned drive. (See brief at page 18.) We agree with
appellants. Appellants argue that the examiner has made a conclusionary statement of
obviousness to “extend this policy [of shortest-seek-time-first] to multiple partitioned drives”
and that all accesses to that partition would be scheduled first then accesses to other
1We note that appellants have offered to modify the term to clearly reference the “physical disk
task list” which would have obviated the rejection, if previously submitted by amendment after final rejection.
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