Patents (was: Re: [BC] The XLR pinout...)

[Alan Kline]

Every US patent ever issued is available on-line from the Patent and Trademark
Office website (www.uspto.gov).  However, those issued before 1976 are only 
available as page images, and are not text-searchable.

But if you have the number, there are several ways of getting the document.
One is www.pat2pdf.org--a website which will fetch the page images from the PTO
and assemble them into a PDF file for download.  Another is a program called
"freePat" from http://www.intelprop.ca/freePat/freePat.html.  This program
not only will download US patents, but British, Canadian, French, EU, and 
others, and is free.

The PTO website *will* allow searches of pre-1976 patents by class number,
and has the index of all of those classifications.  It's a bit of a PITA,
but if you can find the right class number and search for that, then look
at some of the numbers, you can sometimes find what you're looking for...

ak

------ At 08:10 PM 8/14/2006 -0700, The Most Honourable Jeffrey Kopp wrote: -------
>
>Looking for a schematic, I found it is Patent 3060389 (Oct. 1962, Kahn) which is apparently not on-line; it is referred to in a subsequent patent (and shown only as a block): http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4295106.html