Appeal No. 2000-0588 Page 15
Application No. 08/824,110
size or shape, to include that of a pager, as an obvious
design choice. Knowing that miniaturization is available,
reducing a Wingate toy to a hand held device is not beyond
the capability of ordinary skill.
One of ordinary skill in the art at the time of appellants’ invention would not have
considered the toy telephone of Wingate to be a pager and the mere change of size or
shape of the Wingate device to make it a hand held device would not transform it into a
pager as that term is understood in the art. Thus, even if the Wingate toy were
miniaturized as proposed by the examiner, the subject matter of claims 6-9 would not
result.
For the foregoing reasons, we shall not sustain the examiner’s rejection of claims
6-9.
The examiner has rejected claims 10 and 11, which depend from claim 6, and
thus also recite a toy pager, as being unpatentable over Wingate in view of Hughes.
We cannot sustain this rejection for two reasons. First, Hughes does not overcome the
deficiency of Wingate discussed above in regard to the rejection of claim 6. Second,
claims 10 and 11 also call for the message timer to include a clock circuit for generating
a clock signal, a random number generator for generating a first random number, which
is used to generate a first trigger signal, a scaler for generating a timing signal
correlative to the first random number, a counter for receiving the clock signal and
generating a count signal correlative thereto, and a comparator for receiving the timing
signal and count signal and generating a first trigger signal when the timing signal and
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