Patent Application Number: 2009200139
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Facilitator's Comment 
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United States
Although the IC card may eventually replace the magnetic strip card, a large installed base of magnetic strip cards will likely make such transition slow and expensive. [...] In accordance with the system and method of the present invention, the data read and write functions can be performed simultaneously on both the magnetic strip and the IC data storage media of a data card. [...] Although the terminal 1 is capable of operating on data cards 3 having both magnetic strip 7 and IC 5 storage media, it should be understood that the terminal 1 is also operable on a data card having only one of the two types of storage media.
With the possible exception of the "determining" step, the claimed mechanism is a subset of that described or implied in the prior art, wherein the card reader can read either or both a stripe and/or an IC. Now presumably an incompatible IC is one that cannot be read by a particular reader. It seems reasonably obvious that if a card containing a magnetic stripe and an incompatible IC is inserted into the prior art reader, which can read either/both the stripe and/or the IC, that the IC would not be read but the user info would be retrieved from the magnetic stripe. I don't see any significant departure from that in the active "determining" action in the current application. more...