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To: Beelzebubba
The patent's key claim is:

That patent was awarded in 1996. It describes nothing that the Macintosh 'Finder' could not do in 1984. Apple's Lisa did it the year before that. The Xerox Star did all that in 1981. A lot of this stuff was described by Alan Kay in his doctoral dissertation The Reactive Engine, in 1969. There were attempts to implement those ideas as well, but the ideas strained the computers of the day. The first prototype Alto workstation (precursor to the Star) was turned on at Xerox' Palo Alto Research Center in 1973. Its first screen display was a bitmapped image of the Sesame Street character Cookie Monster.

11 posted on 03/07/2003 8:26:27 AM PST by Nick Danger (Freeps Ahoy! Caribbean cruise May 31... from $510 http://www.freeper.org)
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To: Nick Danger; MichiganConservative
You guys are probably right. Which is why all the media fuss about a few extraordinarily bad patents is pointless. Bad patents get invalidated, without too much fuss.
12 posted on 03/07/2003 9:07:18 AM PST by Atlas Sneezed
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