!050194 The PTO's computer systems and networks For those of you curious about the computer systems that the Patent and Trademark Office uses inhouse, what follows is a description of the system and its major components. It is from information on a really neat PTO chart. Their computer systems consist of seven major components: the PTOnet, an Amdahl 5990 mainframe, X.25 WAN, Amdahl 100+ gigabyte DASD, examiner corps workstation network, publications printing network and an optical disk file serving subnetwork. PTOnet At the heart of PTO operations is PTOnet, a three-tiered system with a 500 Mbit/second backplane. Connected to the backplane are multiple 100 Mbit/second FDDI rings, off of which are multiple 802.3 Ethernet subnets which support 10 Mbit/second service to connecting devices. Amdahl 5990 Mainframe Processing all of the text searching, image retreival, classification and printing requests is a three processor Amdahl 5990 mainframe with 86 MIP throughput, 1.5 gigabyte of memory, and 365 gigabytes of disk storage. Supports up to 100 concurrent users and services over 7500 text search requests from examiners and the public. X.25 WAN This is a IBM 3745 Front End communications processor which allows public dialup service, and access by users at the Patent Trademark Depository Libraries around the country (currently less than a dozen sites). Amdahl DASD This is a Amdahl 6380/6390 DASD system of over 100 gigabytes that contain the full text to all US patents since 1971, indexes to the CDROMs with patent images, Japanese patent abstracts text, and patent classification information. Examiners Workstations Thousands of DOS-Based PCs and hundreds of SPARC workstations are connected to the PTOnet through which examiners do patent searches, retreive images and access commercial database services. The workstations are also used to connect to the Internet to use services such as Mosaic. Publications Printing Network Over 40 high speed laser printer systems are connected for the patent examining groups, and the Patent Copy sales office to print out patent data. Connections to commercial databases such as CAS, Lexis/Nexis, DIALOG, ORBIT, QUESTEL, and INPADOC are also provided through this section. Optical File Storage About 500 gigabytes of patent image data is stored on Optimem, LMSI, IC and Sony systems, with Sun workstations for handling file server requests. ============================================================================== All in all, not a bad system, though someone should donate them a Connection Machine so we can hook up the Internet to the PTOnet without crashing their current systems, as well as provide more useful searching and retrieval tools (for those of you who have dealt with the APS syntax). For a half million dollars or so, the Internet could be so connected (though not using a Connection Machine), which one of the Federal Information Superhighways efforts should give to the Patent Office now. Greg Aharonian Internet Patent News Service