[ The following is extracted from a press release from IBM. ]

Press Release: IBM Launches Comprehensive, Free U.S. Patent Search
Web Site

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 9, 1997 -- IBM today launched one of the most
comprehensive free World Wide Web services for finding and viewing
information contained in more than 2 million U.S. patents issued in
the past 26 years.

Leveraging its technical skills in databases, digital libraries and
electronic commerce, IBM's Patent Server site at
http://www.ibm.com/patents permits anyone with access to the
World Wide Web to search and retrieve information free of charge on
patents granted since 1971. Searches can be requested by patent
number or by keywords in certain patent information categories:
title, inventor, assignee, abstract, claims, attorney/agent and
patent references.

Full images of nearly 1 million U.S. patents issued since 1987 can
also be viewed free of charge. IBM intends to add the images of the
1974-1986 patents during the first few months of 1997.

Using a Web order form, copies of U.S. patents can be easily ordered
for a fee from Optipat Inc., with delivery by mail, fax or on
CD-ROM.

In time, IBM intends to expand its patent server's capabilities to
include searching of the full text of patents, international patent
data and links to other patent-information vendors providing
additional supplementary services.

Technical details

IBM's Patent Server provides easy access to the information in
patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from
Jan. 5, 1971 until Dec. 17, 1996. Information and images
of newly issued patents will be regularly added to the database.
The server supports simple searching by keyword, phrase or
patent number as well as more advanced searching using boolean
operators (AND, OR, NOT).

Within any patent, references made to other U.S. patents are
hyperlinked, allowing users to locate and view the "prior-art" by
simply clicking on the cited patents. These links are bi-directional
and use IBM's DB2 relational database to permit easy access to later
patents that reference the document being viewed.

In addition, IBM's Patent Server includes information on patents that
have lapsed and entered the public domain before reaching their
maximum lifetime because their required maintenance fees had not been
paid. (Such fees are due on the fourth, eighth and twelfth
anniversaries of a patent's issue date.)

IBM's Patent Server Web site uses many open-system technologies.
When all of the images are loaded into the system, some 1.2 trillion
bytes of patent data will reside on about 2,800 CD-ROMs made by
Optipat from the official public information files of the U.S.
Patent & Trademark Office. (The information available today --
including images of patents issued since 1987 -- are on about 1,300
CD-ROMs.) The CD-ROMs are accessed by using multiple jukebox-like
optical-disk library units from Pioneer. The searchable data are
contained in a DB2 database running on RS/6000 computers in an AIX
environment. Searches are done by IBM's DB2 and Vertiy's Topic
search engines. The World Wide Web queries are managed by IBM
RS/6000 SP supercomputers. The selected content is delivered to
users via IBM's Advantis network.

The IBM home page can be found on the Internet at: http://www.ibm.com
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Note: IBM is a registered trademark of the International Business
Machines Corp.