Chris Rowley's View from America in issue 74 reported on RCA Corporation's recent US patent number 4,460,958 for a micro system. It may interest your readers to know that the inventors had also made application for a patent in the UK and, because of early publication requirements under UK patent law, the contents of US patent 4,460,958 were known in this country long before the US patent was granted and published.

UK patent application GB 2092785A, complete with six pages of schematic drawings and nine pages of explanatory text, was published on 18 August 1982 - about 23 months before the US patent was published and, coincidentally, exactly two years before the cover date of PCN Issue 74.

Copies of UK patent specifications may be seen, free of charge, by any member of the public at the Science Reference Library in London and at public libraries in Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield.

D. E. Walker
Industrial Property Section
The British Library, London WC2