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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.'"
He invented the ESCAPE KEY!
... he sounds cool.
The basis of his case rests on the fact that http:// is actually HTTP. Luckily, neither he nor IBM patented this invention.
I want to meet this guy
I'd like to get /. to do a question and answer with this guy.
Programming since the '40s!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Find the parallels between this (the BT case) and this patent lawsuit that SightSound is bringing against CDNow but potentally all music/video sellers. (SightSound claims they own the common methods of selling music and video over the Internet, and the judge has allowed the case to go to trial).
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
84 years old, worked at berkley. Started in data entry then developed a macro to do some of it for her. A computer programmer in every sence of the word. Never made a name for herself.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
sPh
He doesn't own a patent, he's just showing prior art; that hyperlinking is really a case of 'escape' execution.
GPL Deconstructed
I loved this quote from the article:
"Technology develops through decades of work by many people. That's why I put my work into the public domain whenever possible."
Why can't everybody think more like this old guy??
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Back in the day, when programmers didn't even ponder the possibility of owning code, or patenting ideas. Back when multiuser operating systems had no passwords, and a commands called "KILL SYSTEM" that strangely enough, although being accessible to everyone, was never abused.
How things have changed.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Today it's more abstract, http:// is an escape sequence indicating that the following characters are to be interpreted as a hostname followed by a path name, which make up a hyperlink aka URL.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Off-topic? Moderator, follow the link.
Anyway, here is more on Mr. Bemer for others who do not follow the link:
At Lockheed, he devised the first computerized 3-D dynamic perspective,
prelude to today's computer animation.
At IBM, he developed
PRINT I (the first load-and-go computer method),
FORTRANSIT (the first major proof of intercomputer portability,
and the second FORTRAN compiler),
Commercial Translator (a COBOL input), and
XTRAN (an ALGOL predecessor).
In 1957 March he was the first to describe commercial timesharing,
which you now see as the Worldwide Web.
In 1959 his internal IBM memo proposed word processing.
The Identification and Environment Divisions of COBOL are due to him,
as is the Picture Clause, which could have avoided the Year 2000 problem
if used correctly.
He coined the terms "COBOL", "CODASYL", and "Software Factory".
He was the major force in developing ASCII (contributing 6 characters --
ESCape (see that key), FS, GS, RS, US, and the backslash). He invented the
escape sequence and registry concept, and is called the "Father of ASCII".
He wrote the original scope and program of work for international and
national computer standards, and chaired the international committee for
programming language standards for eleven years.
He was Program Chairman for ACM 70, promoter of National Computer
Year (when the Y2K problem should have been solved), and edited the
proceedings as the book "Computers and Crisis".
Three Pioneer Days have honored him -- SHARE, COBOL, and FORTRAN.
As editor of the Honeywell Computer Journal (the first A4-size publication
[1971] in the U.S.) he innovated fiche-of-the-issue and multimedia publishing.
He has published more than 110 articles in technical journals.
In 1995 he received the Albion College Distinguished Alumnus Award.
In 2000 he was named in the Delta Tau Delta "Rainbow" as one of the "100
Most Influential Delts of the 20th Century".
He is recognized as the first person in the world to publish warnings of the
Year 2000 problem -- first in 1971, and again in 1979.
Harvey Ball, the creator of the smiley face image, (not the ascii [:-)] ) died not too long ago! He never trademarked his creation, however, but he did form a corporation to make smiley greeting cards and sell them with profits going to charity.
However, some French Dude registered the trademark in a bunch of countries, and Ball considered going after him to keep the smiley free.
This story reminds us why something like the GPL is so important: It ensures that information that is free stays free! Public Domain resources (even smileys!) can be snatched up and made into commodities!
These sorts of concepts which are being pressed at the patent office may be new to some people, but they are not new. In particular, this idea of escapes would have been completely obvious to anybody with a little mathematical training, in 1950 or 1900 or even 100BC.
You could argue that the application of the idea is novel, but differentiating an abstract notion from its collection of concrete instances is a tricky thing, and properly the subject of philosophy and metamathematics, not the patent office's incompetent review staff.
BH
Fools! They laughed at me at the Sorbonne...!
http://www.bobbemer.com/a-plate1.JPG
The Main Page - http://www.bobbemer.com
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
Memex, Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think"... http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~dduchier/misc/vbush/aw mt.html
He mentions then term 'escape sequence' and then somehow binds that to the escape key. The only relation between an 'escape sequence' and an escape key is that the begining on the traditional ansi escape sequence starts with the same code the escape key generates.
An 'escape sequence' according to Webopedia is:
The fact is that the escape sequence in a traditional hyperlink is the information encoded after the filename (that's encoded with URL-encoding). It's all those neat %20 characters.
Check out this quote:
Escape's powers are huge but at its most basic level, it is a command that tells a computer to make a shift in its processing - allowing a user to move up, down or sideways through files, programs or networks. For example, every press of a phone key that allows a user to move through an automated information service is an invocation of Berner's escape principle.
This is just absurd. Escape sequences special sequences encoded other data. A telephone navigation system is merely a command driven system. Nothing is escaped. By this logic, every time anyone tells anything to do anything they are invocating Berner's escape principle.
I understand the guy's position, but Wired really blew it on this story. I'm suprised this made it past the technical editors...
BTW: The article mentions the '/' character as being an escape sequence, but this is not true. If they are referring to the href of a URL, then since the protocol preceeds the '/', this would not be an example of an escape sequence. I think the real issue is the escape sequences preceeded by '%' signs.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
He put the slash in Slashdot (a slash being an interupt, i.e. http\
He put the backslash in ASCII code (without it, where would DOS be now.... oh, I mean.. nevermind)
He Texas Plates are "ASCII". That just rocks in itself.
He helped invent COBOL. I learned to program on COBOL. I can't even imagine the fortitude trying to make an entire programming language. The old programmers had it really tough. Imagine wanting to program in a high level, so you have to design and implement a high level language yourself.
The whole reason this got out is simply because he is fed up with all of these outrageous patents. Hyperlinking... bah, One click purchasing.
He is one of us (albiet probably the oldest)
Slashdot would do good for itself to do an interview with him, maybe even make him the honorary "grandpa" of slashdot.
Blah Blah Blah.
It occurs to me that it is a sad thing that we have to rely on someone like Mr. Bemer to do the job of the government and protect the hapless consumer from the wrath of the corporation and its bevy of lawyers.
There was a post on here which expressed optimism that Mr. Bemer seemed like a responsible enough person to grant the patent. What patent? Why should this be patented to begin with? The system should be rigged such that philanthrophic caretakers should not have to appear; what happens next time when BT decides to patent the power button?
The system is failing the consumer/citizen here. I think deeper introspection is required of the legal system and the IP code.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Actually, they invented the fax machine almost immediately after the telegraph. You wrote the original on some kind of conducting paper and wrapped it on a xmit drum. A needle on the sending machine sent the signal over the telegraph wire to a receiving drum with a pen.
Obviously, though, they didn't use TIFF compression.
You know what's kind of ironic? The fact that the first programmer - Ada Lovelace (okay, not programming as *we* know it but then neither are punch cards, IMO ) and the inventor of the most pervasive business language for decades - Grace Hopper - are women.
And yet the industry is still largely male. Ironic.
I just hope *I'm* still going at 82 like this guy.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
Actually, the reason women were involved with early computers to the extend that they were because prior to the 'computer' as we know it, they were the ones doing calculations for trajectory tables and such and were refered to as 'computors' because THEY computed. They, at that time, were the experts at doing computations.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
He should get the patent to spur controversy over the subject of patents and get them cancelled.
And to succeed, he could try changing the minds of companies that like patents, by charging them a lot of money.
Isn't it so?
Miscellaneous comments have referred to the women who did the ballistics programming on the ENIAC. One person noted that the work was left to women because it was considered "secretarial".
In fact, the women were not ordinary individuals, but were chosen for their mathematical aptitude. History largely ignored them. I read once that there was a big project reunion PR event, and none of them were invited, at least not until someone noticed and made a fuss.
The real question is whether the work was considered secretarial because women could do it, rather than the other way around. My own observation is that quality secretarial work requires an astonishing level of skill. Behind every 5-million-dollar-a-year executive is a 35K/year secretary who actually has most of the responsibility for doing the executive's work. I would argue that the general contempt for secretarial work derives from a general contempt for women and anything they do.
Anybody who has ever been in academia knows that the departments would collapse quickly and entirely without the cadre of highly-skilled and effective departmental secretaries.
Oh, here's a link to a pdf. It took more work than I had time for to locate a really complete history of the women on ENIAC. I did however find this slashlink to a glowing Jon Katz review of a book that claims to tell the whole ENIAC story.
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd tell thee ...
When WWII hit many of those women jumped into engineering and science positions to fill in for the missing men and increased demand.
After the war, most of them were sent back to the kitchen, as it were, in favor of men. However, since computing was so new there weren't men to "come back", and many women worked in the field from 1940-1960. For some reason however they were not replaced by the generation of young women who went to school during those years, so from 1960 - 1980 or so the percentage of women in computing fell drastically.
sPh