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82-Year-Old Coder Trumps BT's Hyperlink Patent
grendelkhan writes: "According to Wired News, 82 year-old programmer, Bob Bemer, claims his creation of escape invalidates British Telecomm's hyperlink patent. He has no intentions on cashing in, he just wants BT to quit suing people and prove, in his own words: 'All this new patent stuff is crazy and counterproductive.'"
I can imagine grandpa's voice.. The fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached..
But...
Mr. Bemer really does have a fascinating background. Read a bit about him here.
Both markup languages (HTML; embedded link) and escapes are out of band metadata. Escapes allow an xterm, a real terminal, etc, to show bold, underline, and so on. I believe some data terminals use escape to mark protected fields for "editing" a page on the screen, then hitting SEND to send the unprotected fields, or maybe the entire screen, back to the computer. And of course you know all about HTML markup :-)
In both cases, the escaped / embedded metadata is not visible on the screen, yet has important information about the page. It is not far fetched at all to consider escaped data as a link. I don't know if it has ever been done, but it could be.
Infuriate left and right
Well he does also claim to have invented ASCII and timeshare computing, so, umm, that question mark thing isn't far off :)
And you probably know it's not the 'Esc' key on your keyboard, but the very idea of an escape sequence that he's talking about (which, of course, is could be triggered in some situations by pressing 'Esc').
I do not have a signature
See subject line. The concept of putting links inside of text is at issue here, this is done with the shift-comma escape sequence. He had similar escape sequences back in the day.
Ummmm... Ted Nelson is neither British nor a scientist. He merely invented hypertext and hypermedia.
"Other examples of hyperlinks also predate BT's patent, including a 1965 book by British scientist Ted Nelson..."
How do I know? Because I co-implemented the first working hypertext and hypermedia on personal computers, for Ted, and demo'd it at the world's first personal computer conference, in Philadelphia, in -- was it 1976?
That was before Radio Shack, IBM, or Apple even made personal computers...
Ted Nelson is merely a grandfather of the World Wide Web. Remind me -- what exactly did BT do except shove electrons through wires?
Wired and BT are BOTH wrong.
I say: fly Ted Nelson by Concorde to the trial and treat him as the VIP he is, pay hom $1,000 and hour as an epert witness, and then give him a share of the winnings in court!
If I read it right, he invented the escape sequence. Like in a shell when you type
rm Stupid\ File\ that\ a\ window\$ lu\$er created.mp3
That is not an escape. That is a "literal next". The ASCII escape character does not mean "use the next character literally", it says "I'm starting some sort of command using the next one or more characters".
That's nothing like the '/' in a URL, and it's not HTTP. This "prior art" is nonsense, but it's nonsense fighting nonsense.
It's not the escape KEY, it's the concept of an escape SEQUENCE. I.E. a character or characters that modifies the meaning of the following characters so that they do something meaningful with the computer. In the "old days" (perhaps not the original old days, but 20+ years ago when I started programming) this was mostly used for cursor positioning on dumb terminals; esc[12;25 would put your cursor at line 12 column 25 or some such.
Before ASCII and ANSI, the character now known as "escape" was commonly called "alt-mode" after the key on the teletype machine. So the only way to end a command string in TECO was "altmode" "altmode". Also before character standardization ^ was up-arrow and _ was back-arrow. Add to that numerous EBCDIC encodings - no there isn't just *one* of them, and you had alphabet soup. Bemer had a principal role in standardizing the character set.
Before the year 2000 problem hit, Bemer proposed a temporary solution for IBM mainframes involving zoned decimals which seems to have disappered along with the Y2K hype.
It's nice to see one of the old guys sticking a knife into the patent monster with a good solid claim of "prior art".
Now go and install mozilla