Appeal No. 1999-2797
Application No. 08/609,875
1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir. 1992).
With respect to independent claim 1, the Examiner proposes
to modify the menu selection device disclosed by Posso.
According to the Examiner (Answer, page 3 which makes reference
to the final Office action mailed August 26, 1998, Paper No. 14),
Posso discloses the claimed invention except for a second manual
control having a scroll enable and a scroll disable mode. To
address this deficiency, the Examiner turns to Kuga which, in a
description of the prior art at column 1, lines 34-39, describes
the operation of a scrolling function on a computer display
screen controlled by scroll start and stop keys on a conventional
keyboard. In the Examiner’s line of reasoning (pages 2 and 3 of
the final Office action):
[t]herefore, it would have been obvious to one
skill [sic, skilled] in the art at the time the
invention was made to have used Kuga’s scroll
start/stop keys into [sic, in] the device of Posso
et al since this is an advantage for Posso’s system
in order to provide a safety feature when accidentally
the scroll key is pressed.
After careful review of the applied prior art references in
light of the arguments of record, we are in general agreement
with Appellants’ position as stated in the Brief. In our view,
the Examiner has combined the teachings of the scrolling features
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