Appeal No. 2002-2151 Application No. 09/342,234 master apparatus are connected to a common transmission path, and the master sends commands through the transmission path to control states of the slave apparatuses. More particularly, appellants' system and method reduces or eliminates the burden on the master apparatus to monitor slave apparatuses for an abnormal state and then restore a slave apparatus from an abnormal state if such occurs, by having the master apparatus only periodically notify the slave apparatuses of the system state command and each of the slave apparatuses themselves provided with means whereby each slave apparatus recognizes, in response to the system state command, an abnormal state and then conducts by itself processing for restoring from an abnormal state. Independent claims 1 and 7 are representative of the subject matter on appeal, and a copy of those claims can be found in the Appendix to appellants' brief. The prior art references of record relied upon by the examiner in rejecting the appealed claim are: Weiss 6,038,500 Mar. 14, 2000 Iihoshi et al. (Iihoshi) 6,052,632 Apr. 18, 2000 Claims 1 through 10 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Weiss in view of Iihoshi. 22Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007