Appeal No. 1998-3128 Page 2
Application No. 08/624,874
Building on advances of a now commercially available CNC
machine controller, viz., the Thermwood 91000 SuperControl,
the appellant's invention takes advantage of the controller's
multi-processor, multi-tasking abilities to monitor and store
status information about each controller in a multi-controller
arrangement and to retrieve such information at a central
remote site. More specifically, a number of CNC machine
controllers are associated in the same plant or facility or in
related facilities. Each CNC machine controller gathers and
stores status information related to the state of operations
being performed. A remotely located central computer
separately addresses each controller to transfer the status
information to a central location where the entire arrangement
can be evaluated.
Claim 1, which is representative for our purposes,
follows:
1. A system for selectively transferring
information between a central computer and a
plurality of remotely located computer-numerical-
control (CNC) machine controllers, each having a
multi-tasking capability comprising:
a central computer;
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