| The US application was forwarded essentially unchanged to the European Patent Office in 1992 |
| The office action in 1993 was to reject the most important claims based on a Technical Disclosure from IBM Corp dated 1988, describing an "Extended Router Mechanism" |
| Our response to that was to show the EPO examiner how we could be differentiated
from that prior art, which is in essence dynamic linking carried to the
extreme of causing an error when a linked-to piece is not found.
The successful argument we made was that the process we refer to as "association" is incomplete and therefore cannot permit execution to commence until all such links are resolved. A dynamically-linked system with such a missing piece has the property that it may crash irreversibly without the possibility of cleanup. Association before execution is therefore absolutely necessary, and is distinct and in addition to the method of dynamic linking. |
The remaining European formalities were translation and issuance of the various national patents.