I never really subscribed to the 'MS is behind SCO' crap. I'm sure MS loved it and it made the 25 Million dollar licensing deal easier to swallow but I don't think monkey boy was throwing chairs with secret instructions at Darl.
With this one (and his royal chair chuckers slip up in London the other day) its pretty obvious MS is playing a *larger* part in all of this then they will ever admit to.
Here is a screen shot of Workbench 1.0 the icons in the top left corner are for shuffling through virtual desktops
"A unique feature of Workbench is multiple screens. These are conceptually similar to X Window System virtual desktops or workspaces, but are generated dynamically by application programs as necessary. Each screen can have a different resolution and colour depth. A gadget in the top-right corner of the screen allows screens to be cycled - as the OS stores all screens in memory simultaneously, redrawing is instantaneous. Screens can also be dragged up and down by their title bars. On older Amigas this functionality was provided by the custom chipsets specially designed for the platform, but since AmigaOS4 a new technique is adopted and the screens are draggable in any direction. Drag and drop between different screens is possible too.
Underlying the Workbench is the Intuition windowing system. This controls and draws screens, windows and gadgets, and handles input from the keyboard and mouse, passing messages to programs."
So we know that the concept of virtual desktops was well established *at last* two years before this patent was applied for. The question at hand is does this patent do anything that is not an obvious extension of this idea.
Does allowing an object to occupy several workspaces count as non obvious?