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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.'"
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
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
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...!
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.
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.
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!