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To: Scumbria who wrote (49579)	8/13/2000 12:55:33 PM
From: Barry A. Watzman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

The definition of what is "obvious" is not at all obvious. A more appropriate response would be that whether you think it's "magical, creative or non-obvious" has no bearing on whether or not it is patentable. True fact: There are "smart cards" which are plastic credit cards which have imbeded memory or microprocessor chips. These have gold contacts on the face of the card that are contacted by pins when the card is inserted into the card reader. They are widely used in Europe, less widely so (but increasing) in the US. There is a patent for a method of reading the card when the first attempt to do so fails which has been tested in court and which has held up. The method consists of moving (wiggling) the card and trying the read a 2nd time. The patent was originally applied to motorized card readers in ATM machines. The courts have now ruled that this patent covers telling the card owner to remove and reinsert the card, when dealing with manual, non-motorized card readers (as are found in many Satellite TV receivers and many gas pumps). Royalties are being paid to the holder of this patent for something that seems to me to be both obvious and intuitive.

To: Scumbria who wrote (49579)	8/13/2000 5:25:39 PM
From: John Walliker	Respond to of 93625

Scumbria, Timing registers have been in wide use for a long time in the memory controller. As soon as synchronous memory was introduced, the registers were moved over to the DRAM side of the bus. Nothing magical, creative or non-obvious going on here. I don't agree with you about this. Registered memory (which holds the current output until an external signal triggers the release of the next chunk of data) was available a long time ago. It used a dedicated pin (controlled by external circuits) to do this. I think that transmitting timing information to the memory device and then allowing it to control its own output timing accordingly was novel in those days. John