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Mayrath v. Commissioner, 41 T.C. 582, 590-591 (1964), affd. 357
F.2d 209 (5th Cir. 1966) (rejecting section 174 deduction for
development of experimental house which involved the use of
standard construction principles).
The Trust TU project was not one that expanded or refined the
principles of computer science. Nothing new was accomplished. The
capacity to develop the project was already a part of the skilled
practice of NTS and had been achieved elsewhere. To the extent
risks were present in this project, they related solely to business
risk, not to technical risk that involved substantial uncertainty.
C. Success
Dr. McDermott described the technical efforts of developing
the Success equipment leasing system as "getting TPF [the
processor] to do things slightly beyond what it was designed to do"
(although later in the same report he indicated that the Success
project pushed the TPF system "well beyond its known limits"). He
found serious questions regarding whether the "complex data
structures" required by Success could be handled within the TPF
framework, and the solutions developed by NFISG "made a definite
contribution to computer science". He further found that Success
provided a substantial improvement over its predecessor, Infolease,
in terms of speed, functionality, and data integrity.
Dr. Davis found that the development of the Success system
involved nothing more than routine practice, and that none of the
activities required the use of a process of experimentation. He
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