HP 150 Financial Calculator Software Patent

[Martin Hepperle]

Recently, I revisited the US Patent 4,649,499 of 1987.

The PDF document describes the touchscreen software for the Cardfile and the HP-12C Financial calculator.
It mentions two appendices in Microfiche form.
These are not easily accessible to normal people like me.

Appendix B seems to contain program listings for the HP-12C simulator and would be very interesting.

Were these micro fiches typically filed together with the Patent documents and could they still exist? Maybe they have been converted to paper/scans? Or just deleted after so many years?

I could imagine, that someone working in the field of patents, might be able to retrieve copies of these appendices.
So I would like to know, whether someone has access to Patent publications at this level and especially to these micro-fiches.

Martin

[Didier Lachieze]

You may send an FOIA request to USPTO to get a copy of these micro-fiches, but I don’t know if a non-US citizen can send such request.

[Felix Gross]

Appendix B is part of the description and should be publicly accessible as prior art.

But the case seems to be too old to have all filed patent documents als scanned versions in the USPTO database (https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair).

There are parallel cases in Japan (https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/s...H0548486B2) and the United Kingdom (https://www.ipo.gov.uk/p-ipsum/Case/Publ.../GB2156114).

I checked the UK database and it only contains the patent document, in particular not the Appendix B.

Contacting the USPTO, as Didier suggested might be the best option.

Felix

[Martin Hepperle]

In the meantime I asked whether the additional pages/microfiches were obtainable, but the reply is to buy a copy of the patent papers.

However I am not sure whether these would indeed include the missing appendix - probably I would only obtain the paper part which i already have. I am not a fan of prepaying an unknown amount for something I already have in my hands.

So I will probably not follow that road for now.

Martin