Appeal No. 1998-1903
Application No. 08/353,258
No. 28, filed November 14, 1996) and Supplemental Brief (Paper
No. 34, filed August 28, 1997) for appellant's arguments
thereagainst.
OPINION
We have carefully considered the claims, the applied
prior art references, and the respective positions articulated
by appellant and the examiner. As a consequence of our
review, we will reverse the obviousness rejection of claims 1
through 8, 11 through 15, 17, and 21.
Both the examiner and appellant apparently agree that
Johnston does not disclose a means for or step of encoding, as
recited in each of the independent claims. We too agree that
Johnston lacks any teaching of encoding. The examiner relies
on Aleksander to provide the particular encoding specified in
the claims. However, we find Aleksander's disclosure to be
insufficient to meet the limitations in the claims, as
discussed infra.
Aleksander discusses (second column, page 36) three types
of codes, a direct binary code, a reflexive Gray code (which
has the same number of bits as a binary code), and a 1-in-n
code (hereinafter referred to as a bar code). In particular,
4
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