The prosecution history for the application that was the subject of Gottschalk v. Benson at the Supreme Court in 1972 (409 U.S. 63) would not normally be available because a patent was not granted. (This was before the publication of pending patent applications.) However, because the rejection of the application by the Patent Office was appealed to the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA), the prosecution history was included as an appendix to the briefs filed with the CCPA.
Those briefs are available from the National Archives, and were scanned by Professor Hollaar. Available here are:
Of particular interest in the prosecution history are the description of the claimed "reentrant shift register" on page 6 of the PDF file (page 4 of the prosecution history), Benson's statement that "the method represented by these claims can also be carried out by hand, the shifting and adding operations being manual" (page 25 of the PDF, page 23 of the prosecution history), and "They can even be practiced by hand." (page 27 of the PDF, page 24 of the prosecution history).
This page was last revised on January 22, 2014.