Adams sues Siemens, Dell, Sony over 3 patents

On May 12, 2005, Phillip M. Adams & Associates LLC sued Sony, Lenovo, Dell, MPC and Fujitsu Siemens over US 5,379,414; 5,983,002, and 6,401,222. There is another action against Gateway. HP and Compaq have taken licenses.

US 5,379,414 to Phillip M. Adams is entitled --Systems and methods for FDC error detection and prevention-- and the first claim recites

A method for detecting and preventing floppy diskette controller data transfer errors in computer systems having:

a central processing unit (CPU);

a system interrupt timer;

a floppy diskette, the floppy diskette having at least one sector for receiving multiple data bytes;

a floppy diskette controller (FDC) for controlling the transfer of data to the floppy diskette;

means associated with the FDC for providing a data request (DREQ) signal and a data acknowledge (DACK) signal, the DREQ signal being provided when data transfer is requested and the DACK signal being provided when data transfer is permitted; and

means for counting data bytes transferred to the floppy diskette, said counting means providing a data transfer byte count,

the method comprising the steps of:

determining if a requested computer system operation is a floppy diskette write operation;

reading the data transfer byte count provided by said counting means;

monitoring data byte transfers to the floppy diskette so as to determine when a last data byte is being transferred to a sector of the floppy diskette;

measuring time between the data request (DREQ) and data acknowledge (DACK) signals for said last data byte transfer to a sector of the floppy diskette; and

forcing an error condition if the measured time between said DREQ and DACK signals exceeds a specified value.

The first claim of US 5,983,002 recites:

An apparatus for detecting a defective floppy diskette controller, the apparatus comprising:

a processor executing detection executables effective to determine an underrun error undetected by a floppy diskette controller and effective to identify the floppy diskette controller as defective;

a memory device operably connected to the processor to store the detection executables and corresponding detection data;

a system clock operably connected to the processor to provide a time base;

a media drive comprising storage media for storing data;

the floppy diskette controller operably connected to the media drive to control formatting and storage of data on the storage media; and

a direct memory access controller operably connected to the floppy diskette controller and the memory device to control transfers of data between the memory device and the floppy diskette controller.



US 6,401,222 is a cip [co-pending application Ser. No. 08/729,172 filed on Oct. 11, 1996 now U.S. Pat. No. 5,983,002 for Defective Floppy Diskette Controller Detection Apparatus and Method.] and the first claim recites:

An apparatus for detecting a defective floppy diskette controller, the apparatus comprising:

a processor executing detection executables effective to determine an under run error undetected by a floppy diskette controller;

a memory device operably connected to the processor to store the detection executables and corresponding detection data;

a system clock operably connected to the processor to provide a time base;

a media drive comprising storage media for storing data formatted in sectors;

the floppy diskette controller operably connected to the media drive to control formatting and storage of data on the storage media; and

a memory controller operably connected with the floppy diskette controller for providing data to the floppy diskette controller.