USPTO Issues Microsoft A Patent For 60's Technology

theodp writes "On Tuesday, the USPTO issued U.S. patent no. 6,594,674 to Microsoft for a System and method for creating multiple files from a single source file, which describes a fundamental IBM Mainframe file structure, the Partitioned Data Set, that's been around since the 60's and is familiar to virtually anyone who's used a mainframe text editor in the past five decades. To the amazement of readers of an IBM newsgroup, neither Microsoft nor the USPTO examiners seem to be aware of the existence of the Mainframe-based prior art, which is not cited in the patent."

Comments

Reiser FS

[phnx90]

Doesnt Reiser FS 4 also have this feature.

Can This Actually Be Patented?

[ratboy666]

I guess the answer is "Yes, a patent was granted".

Now I am going to be a mudraker. Here is an implementation of this patent under
Linux (so sue me). Effectively only 6 lines of shell script. Do what you want with it.

I would have thought that it should take longer than 4 minutes to implement a patent -- this one is really pushing "obvious", even ignoring the prior art issue.

# create a 2mbyte pds
dd if=/dev/zero of=myfile bs=1k count=2k
# make it into a file system (pds) /sbin/mke2fs myfile
# make a mount point for the pds
mkdir mydir
mount myfile mydir -o loop
# make some files in the new pds
for i in a b c d; do touch mydir/$i; done
# and now some links to the members
for i in a b c d; do ln -s mydir/$i $i; done
# now, if you modify file a, b, c or d
# the contents of the pds "myfile" are changed.
# the pds can be unmounted, and read or
# written as a single file "cp myfile myfile2"
# would be an example.
# When mounted the symbolic links allow automatic
# internal access

Ratboy.

Besides mainframes

[mrami]

On a not-so-close reading wouldn't Macs' resource and data forks and ResEdit fall under this patent as well?

Re:Of course MS is aware of prior art...

[Asprin]

Yup, I'm right. MS's DoubleSpace infringed on sisk compression patents held by Stac, Inc.

To wit:

Here is Stac's original complaint
One guy's opinion
Wikipedia entry (scroll down a ways to 1993)
I should just let you Google these yourself.

So, clearly filesystems like MS is describing have not only been around since before 2000, but MS lost lawsuits over them 10 years ago! THAT'S JUST ONE EXAMPLE!