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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.'"
"Can we get him?"
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
That'll show big business what the old-timers can do! I reckon as punishment, BT should have to listen to one of his stories about either his long walks to school, duking german bullets and hiding from japanese commandos, or about the time he took a walk in the park, then went on the ferry and found a dime, that dime looked......
The Pain will be never ending... Death to Stupid Lawsuits!!!!
...and license it to everyone in the world for nothing, except BT which would have to pay $1 billion.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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
This guy truly deserves the patent. He seems like a person who would use it responsibly...
If more people were like this think of where the idustry would be today.
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.
He doesn't own a patent, he's just showing prior art; that hyperlinking is really a case of 'escape' execution.
GPL Deconstructed
If there's anybody claiming patents built on 'escape' technology then it's MS.
Ctrl-Alt-Esc is the way I usually shut down my MS applications for godsake.
Next thing you know, he'll be making other outragous claims, such as he invented the question mark and will accuse chestnuts of laziness.
This can't be said enough. Read my other post here
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
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
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
Oops, that should be "separate from the text". Preview is my friend.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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!
Even if his claim doesn't pass judicial muster, it *will* throw a monkey wrench into BT's legal plans. At the very least i bet it costs em a few million more in legal fees as they analyze things before they (hopefully) get thrown out of court on their arse
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...!
And so does wired.
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
Those kinds of escapes, the ones that are used to within normal text to denote something to be handled non-literally. In other words, he is actually claiming that HTML uses escape sequences < and > to denote special handling of hyperlinks, same with the ampersand escaped characters, like I just used.
The escape key has nothing to do with this.
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
If we're going to talk about them as a "concept" then the first table of contents, index, bibliography, dictionary, etc ad nausium, trump BT's "concept". It's the encoding that automates the looking up of the object of interest that makes hyperlinks useful and even interesting at all.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
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.
RTFA.
His discussion about prior art is talking about the use of escape sequences to link term A on computer A to data B on computer B.
The talking of escape sequence is just a premise of what it is. It's a vague abstracted concept that basically equates to user-defined interrupt calls that can happen at any time, inserted by the end user or the program.
Hyperlinks as a concept, are innovations build upon actual escape sequences as used previously. I'm wondering when we are going to start seeing classes coming up that deal with Computer History were people can learn about Berner, Hooper, Lovelace and the rest of the bunch.
In a nutshell: Everything we have done since 1957 is based upon the work they did before.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
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.
YEAH BABY!
'bout time a pattentholder isn't lookin to cash in...
Hyperlinks as a concept, are innovations build upon actual escape sequences as used previously.
Inspiration is not the same as prior art. Velcro was inspired by thistles in nature, but so what? Velcro was a brilliant invention.
The concept of the hyperlink is irrelevent to the implementation of a hyperlink. They can be implemented totally without any sort of embedded escapes.
Everything we have done since 1957 is based upon the work they did before.
While I believe that there isn't much original in CS since the 60s (and have posted this before), "everything" is an exaggeration. Trivial example: video compression (MPEG4). Sheesh, even Hoare's Quicksort paper was early sixties, I believe. The mouse came in the late sixties.
More recently, there are a slew of "real world" graphics rendering theories that have been done in the last 10 years, particularly in the area of light diffusion.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Which one played him in the movie.
Wasn't Bemer portrayed by Steve McQueen. Those damned Nazis. If it wasn't for the 'escape' we never would have witnessed one of the finest war movies of all time.
I dunno what it is but it's funny to think of an 82 yr old programmer throwing a baseball back forth against his cubicle wall.
:)
Had Bemer or IBM, his employer at the time, patented the escape concept, he or they could own a sizable chunk of the world's technology right now.
If he had indeed patented this in 1960, the patent would have expired by now. Even if it took a few years for him to get the patent, the 17 years would be long over.
Unless he purposely dragged on the application process for years to make the patent last longer, like The Patent King.
Now, there is a 20 year limit from the year of filing.
IANAL, BIWOWALF3Y.
yo.
very cool that the old guys knew that this stuff belonged in the public domain. now if we could only convince that generation following them!
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!
I'm wondering when we are going to start seeing classes coming up that deal with Computer History were people can learn about Berner, Hooper, Lovelace and the rest of the bunch.
I wonder the same thing myself. I know for certain I only became truly interested in the formal part of computing after getting some perspective from the history (the whole Turing/Bletchley Park story, Von Neumann, birth of high-level languages, etc).
But practically none of that was part of my formal coursework, and then it was mostly the evolution of OSes.
It was by my own personal interest (and probably pure chance) that I got Enigma and Codebreakers, and I was hooked. Not only did it increase my enthusiasm in subjects I had considered dry and unrelated to what I thought CS was about, it helped me understand them much better by providing perspective on where these ideas came from and why they are significant.
The same applies to many other subjects in science. I would have found modern physics a more compelling and understandable subject from the beginning if I had known of the history behind it, instead of patching up my educational gaps later when I found out what the point was.
I'm sure including courses in History of X Science as part of the requirements/electives of scientific majors would benefit many students.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
it was developed to take the intellectual challenge out of crashing the system, thus removing any motivation to do so (for the old school hackers anyway, not the testosterone-pissfest-let'sfuckshitup 14-year old script kiddies of today :-/). ISTR i learned of it reading Steven Levy's _Hackers_, but ICBW... see ITS on jargon.org for some background on the OS it was "featured" in.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Kind of ironic that the "Father of ASCII" worked for IBM, that bastion of EBCDIC.
-- Alastair
"I'm wondering when we are going to start seeing classes coming up that deal with Computer History were people can learn about Berner, Hooper, Lovelace and the rest of the bunch."
Lovelace? Dude, he's not *THAT* old. Unless you are talking about those terrible rumours about he and that geek groupie Linda.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
True. My mother is 81, and has been a pretty obsessive computer user for nigh on 20 years now. She regularly upgrades her system, helps out other old folks with their computers at the place where she lives, and is on the net damn near as much as any 20 year old cyberphile. I've even run across the occasional thing in her url history list that I had to do an immediate mental CTRL-ALT-DELETE about.
If the monitor were touchscreen and allowed navigation of documents via point and follow, without a mouse or keyboard interface.
A hyperlink, after all, is only a button without the IMG tag, and a button is really an esc key without the white silk screened text and membrane-spring tactile mechanism...
GPL Deconstructed
Inspiration is not the same as prior art. Velcro was inspired by thistles in nature, but so what? Velcro was a brilliant invention.
The concept of the hyperlink is irrelevent to the implementation of a hyperlink. They can be implemented totally without any sort of embedded escapes.
Your velcro analogy would be more correct if it was natures way of causing two seeds to stick together and that was it's function.
His used escape sequences to a pointer and documents from two different hosts. That is a 'hyperlink' in a general sense of the word. It's not HTML formatted, but it is a link.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Please go back to school.
Thank you.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I'm not saying that it invalidates them. I'm saying that Einstein claiming to invent newtons laws would just be wrong. Such as BT claiming to invent hyperlinking is wrong.
Credit the mothers and fathers of science and learn about them, not profit off their work. Actually, it's highly probably that a lack of Franklin's influence would be a lot less substantial than Tessla's work.
And please use preview.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
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".
And in win2k, it switch apps, just like alt-tab.
All that is true. But what does any of that have to do with hyperlinks -- the CONCEPT of hyperlinks, not the implementation. Hyperlinks have nothing to do with in-band data, or out-of-band data. That's all implementation detail.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
He's an interesting guy, the Father of ASCII.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=27986&op=Reply &threshold=-1&commentsort=3&tid=155&mode=nested&pi d=3011804
is NOT a hyperlink.
To be a hyperlink it would need the proper escape sequences.
Do you mean the CONCEPT of something that takes you somewhere and occupies zero space to do it? Or upper case is text and lower case is hyperlink? Or tagged text as in tntotrtmtatlt tttetxtt or hhhyhphehrhlhihnhk?
I don't support BT, but the escape key sequence has at best a tenuous connection to hyperlinks. Just because you need some kind of keyword sequence to embed a link in text does not mean that this embodies the whole idea of a hyperlink, infact it has almost nothing to do with hyperlinking. The REAL prior art has already been discovered, we don't need to claim unrelated art defeats the BT patent claims, this will only distract and strengthen BT's invalid claim.
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?
sorry, i forgot, we currently live in a world where if we are given a cup of coffee there are two possible eventualities ...
Well, actually there are three. Too cold, OK, and too hot. In the McDonalds' case it was too hot - McDonalds served coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees (home coffee is about 135 degrees)* which is too hot for human consumption. Over 700 incidents had been reported to McDonalds relating to burns from coffee that was too hot.
The award of $2.7 million punitive damages was not because she burnt herself (she got $160,000 damages for that) but because McDonalds were knowingly indulging in a dangerous business practice. They has since rectified their practices.
The whole thing would not have happened if the company had agreed to pay the woman's medical bills ($20,000) in the first place (they rejected this out-of-hand).
* 180 degree coffee will cause a third degree burn in between two and seven seconds. In contrast you would have to pour 135 degree coffee over a skin for at least 60 seconds before doing the same damage.
your knowledge of pointless statistics is impressive
... and if your this good with numbers, what about stats on how long it would take a 180 degree cup of coffee to cool down to 135 degrees?
... open up the lid
You ain't seen nothing yet.
okay, so i did comp sci and not chemistry and uni,
My commiserations.
but doesnt water evaporate after hitting the magical 100 degree mark?
Before trying to be a smart arse I'd strongly advise getting your technical terms correct (otherwise you look like a prat) - water evaporates before 100 degrees, boils at 100 degrees, and only exists as vapour after 100 degrees. And all this is only true at atmospheric pressure.
It is possible, of course, that you are ignorant of the Fahrenheit scale of temperature (which is widely used in the US). You have my best wishes for a speedy rehabilitation from such a blinkered and bleak existance.
It depends on the shape of the cup, the material the cup was made of, the ambient temperature, whether the lid was on, the material the lid was made off, the amount of coffee, etc etc....
However, the answer is about 30 minutes.
i suppose there is a third option, the 'too-hot-coffee-in-the-hands-of-a-non-retard' option
The coffee spilled when she was trying to open the lid. She was also 81 years old at the time of the incident.
blow on it
Erm - you want to blow on it before opening the lid? Why?
If your coffee at home is 135F, you're making it wrong. The water should be at 195F when it hits the grounds
Who said anything about the temperature you make it at? It is the temperature you serve it at that is important.
Out of how many billion cups of coffee served at thousands of locations over 50-odd years?
The 700 reported incidents was in the ten year period 1982 to 1992. These were the incidents where they paid out. As it was brought up at the trial I would have thought you'd have known this...
I should really learn to stop responding to people who think that they and only they have all the facts on the case.
Maybe you should learn the facts instead - there are plenty of references.
About 140 degrees is an acceptable temperature to drink it at (any hotter and it isn't actually drinkable). It is in a syrofoam cup with a lid, so it takes few minutes (at least) to cool down noticibly.
As it happens McDonalds have decreased the temperature of the coffee, so you probably haven't even noticed that you have been deprived of choice.
I never buy anything there - I prefer food.
Unfortunately I think a lot of people are turned off hearing about Turing and Von Neumann not because they didn't play an important part in the creation of computer science but because of the things that were going on.
When I was younger I started reading about the early computing days (Going back to the wonderful countess of Lovelace and her difference machine) and being completely intruiged if for no other reason to be able to gain a little insight as to what it was like to be in a world where the operating system you used was one you built, because there were no alternatives.
I hope a Great Ideas course does pop up in uni's -- I think a lot of the next generation CS majors could stand to learn a lot from it.
If you ask a physicist who discovered displacement, they know. Ask your average computer scientist who created the spreadsheet, and they stare blankly. (Or respond Microsoft!)
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Uhm, actually it does.
Escape sequences were directly used to communicate commands and documents between computers.
The concept and method of linking documents across distributed computers arises directly from the usage of escape sequences on old IBM mainframes. It was before my time, but I do know from reading that dumb terminals used escape sequences to load pages from the mainframe. Explain again how it has nothing to do with that...
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Now, I'm not saying I like this system, mind you. I don't. But the patent office simply doesn't have the resources and isn't give the responsibility to check patents more rigorously.