Appeal 2007-2127
Reexamination Control No. 90/006,621
g. Editor does not have other "thread" attributes
"Threads" in a "preemptive multithreading" environment have many
other attributes besides those discussed above, which are not taught or
suggested by the 1982, 1985, or 1990 applications. First, threads in a
multithreaded program are started by special program instructions, whereas
the editor in the 1982 application is another program started by an interrupt.
The fact that the editor is not started by instructions in the compiler is more
evidence that the editor and compiler are not part of the same program.
Second, there is no "scheduling" or "dispatching" of threads in Patent
Owner's applications. The 1982 application does not describe an operating
system capable of scheduling and dispatching threads. Although claim 31 in
the '604 patent recites a "thread scheduler," this is just an attempt to make
the claim sound more like the OS/2 system because the 1982 application
does not describe "scheduling" to decide which thread will execute.
Third, the MS-DOS operating system in existence in 1982 was not
capable of "multithreading" as that term is defined in the art. See Custer,
Inside Windows NT , page 106 ("Win32 and OS/2, for example, allow
multiple threads per process, whereas POSIX, MS-DOS, and the Windows
16-bit environments do not.").
Fourth, the thread context includes at least the contents of thread's
stack and register set, including the program counter. See, e.g., Iacobucci,
OS/2 Programmer's Guide, page 106-107 ("The thread provides program
code with an execution environment that consists of the register values,
stack, and the CPU mode. The execution environment is collectively
referred to as the thread's context."); Krantz, OS/2, page 64 ("Each thread of
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