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.

Prior Art

[kurosawdust]

From poll "Number of Non-Hidden Files in your Home Directory", code snippet submitted by AC:

for ((a=0; a<99999999; a++));
do
&nbsp; touch file$a;
done

Creates multiple files from a single source file.
Prior art.
My foot's asleep.

Next patent

[Baikala]

In another news Microsoft applies for a patent on "circular-shaped-low-friction moving support for vehicles" as an adendum to it's "Microsoft wheel patent".

Officials are not aware of any prior art

Re:Next patent

[Stephen Samuel]

Low-friction wheels don't work very well, as is evidenced by the difficulty in driving on ice,

Standard Microsoft design error for well known process.
(sigh)

Loopback??

[linuxwrangler]

dd if=/dev/zero of=patentedbyMS bs=1024k count=1024
mke2fs -b 1024 -F patentedbyMS
mount -t ext2 -o rw,loop=/dev/loop patentedbyMS /mnt/priorart

the 60's

[jpsst34]

I can't speak for the Patent Office, but MS aren't aware of this prior art because he's simply too young. In the 60's, Gates hadn't even smoked his first crack pipe yet.

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?

Amazed?

[reynaert]

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."

I don't understand why they are amazed. Mainframe technology is essentielly the Dark Age of Computing. Nobody knows about it, and no place teaches it.

What are "Partitioned Data Sets"? Dunno, I've never heard of them. The link certainly doesn't explain, that's just dinosaur mumbo jumbo. (And what's so special about that editor screenshot?)

This is by the way IBM is porting Linux to their mainframes. Customers might need the high reliability etc., but they still won't buy them if they can't find anyone who knows how to use the native operating systems, let alone program them.

Re:Amazed?

[linuxwrangler]

Wrong. What is true is that people get immersed in their own areas of expertise and when they look up they are "amazed" that there is more to the world. Just look at todays /. story about TRON. How many IT people do you think have heard of that? Almost none (till today), I'd wager. That doesn't change the fact that there are billions of copies in use.

The mainframe is far from dead. There are lots of jobs that are better handled by something other than sticking a bunch of x86 processors in a room together and many of those jobs are better handled by mainframes.

Microsoft is not staffed by dummies - they are able to research the literature. In this instance it appears that they screwed up or they lied.

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!

wish I could say I was suprised...

[josepha48]

.. but I used to work at that office and had to get out to get away from the 'dumbing effect' it has on people. Not all people who work there are that dumb, but the problem is that they have quotas of how many actions they must perform a week. Each patent has 2 actions.

First action is usually a rejection on something, but not always. Could be language / semantics, or something. Could also be peior art if the examiner finds any.

The second action is then the final rejection or allowance. This needs to be based on the first action, so if the first action was a rejection on language then the second action is usually an allowance. If the first action was based on prior art and the art was good then it is usually a rejection. Most stuff is never black and white, there are some 65million colors that most patents fall into.

If you go back and forth more than 2 times on any patent then you spin your wheels as a patent examiner, and don't get credit for a third or fourth action if you have to do more than 2 actions on a patent. Thus if you don't find anything in a period of time, then you have to allow it.

As you get promoted in the patent office, you are expected to do MORE actions. So if you start out as a GS7 you have 4 actions about every 2 weeks. When you become a GS9 it is 5-1/2 actions about every two weeks. (GS is goverment job scale ratings. ) It was like that when I was there and I doubt it has changed much. The actual number of actions may not be 100% correct but it is close enough that anyone with an IQ smarter than a tomato plant can get the general idea.

Re:Microsoft knew..

[John Hasler]

> It's the USPTO people who are missing this
> experience to find prior art. But can we really
> expect one (government) organization to have deep
> experience in every field?

That is _exactly_ what the USPTO is supposed to do: employ examiners expert in every field. They are also supposed to require them to thoroughly research every application.

> There's something fundamentally wrong with the
> idea of the USPTO.

Yes, but this isn't it. Thirty years ago bullshit patents like this were not granted.

Think they are talking NTFS Alternate Data Streams

[asdkrht]

Well, it sounds more like Microsoft was intending to patent the "Alternate Data Stream" feature of the NTFS file system. You know, the whole a file called filename.txt:stream.txt is not the same as filename.txt:hidden.txt thing. Also, it's really nice that you can't see the newly created Alternate Data Stream (ADS) files. So using ADS it's a really nice way to hide stuff... even when running applications they will not show up as being a ADS executable (i.e. the executable will not be something like filename.txt and not filename.txt:foo.exe).

An example is shown here HOWTO: Use NTFS Alternate Data Streams

I'm not sure if a similar feature existed in prior OS or not, since I'm not familiar with the mainframe OSs of long ago, but, I think this feature has been a part of the NTFS file system since NT 3.1

Of course, the whole NTFS Alternate Data Stream (ADS) thing can be evil if it is misused. I mean you cant see ADS using DIR or Windows Explorer.

Re:Microsoft knew..

[Anonymous Coward]

If M$ knew, and didn't inform the PTO, that's called fraud on the Patent Office, for which 'da Gov can do very, very bad things to the inventor and to the counsel who filed the application. And, IAAL.