ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 4 -- United States Patent no. 12,322,912, issued on June 3, was assigned to International Business Machines Corp. (Armonk, N.Y.).
"Plug count limiter for cables" was invented by Kevin O'Connell (Rochester, Minn.), Timothy Clyde Buchholtz (Rochester, Minn.), George Russell Zettles IV (Rochester, Minn.), Karl Erickson (Rochester, Minn.), George Paulik (Rochester, Minn.), Jarrett Betke (Rochester, Minn.), Timothy Lindquist (Rochester, Minn.) and Daniel Ramirez (Rochester, Minn.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A cable connector for counting a number of plug-in events and preventing further plug in attempts after a threshold number of plug-in events have occurred. An inner sle...