Appeal 2007-2127
Reexamination Control No. 90/006,621
designate it a continuation of the 1982 and 1985 applications) which:
(1) omitted the computer program appendix; and (2) added that the code
processed by the program can be a natural language, such as English, or the
numbers and strings of a spreadsheet or database, and that lexical analysis
may be used to determine correct spelling and syntactic analysis may be
used to determine correct grammar of a natural language code.
The IBM and Microsoft Corporations jointly developed a new
operating system called Operating System/2 (OS/2), which was announced
in 1987 and extensively written about beginning in 1988. OS/2 was the first
major operating system with support for "threads" and "multithreading."
Patent Owner decided that the terms "threads" and "multithreading"
were coined or became common in the art after the filing of his 1982
application and described his invention. Patent Owner began amending his
1990 application after it was filed to disclose and claim "threads" and
"multithreading." Patent Owner stated during prosecution that these terms
had their ordinary and customary meanings in the art, that he did not intend
"multithreading" to have a definition which is distinct from the ordinary
generally understood meaning to those skilled in the art, and referred to
dictionaries and books as evidence of the well-defined meanings in the art.
The examiner did not object to the amendments to the specification under
35 U.S.C. § 132 as new matter, or reject the claims based on lack of written
description under § 112, first paragraph. The examiner accorded the 1990
application the benefit of the 1982 filing date because he did not reject the
claims over OS/2, although several OS/2 references were cited by the Patent
Owner. The application issued as the '603 patent in 1997.
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