Slashdot Mirror
Are MS, W3C Barking Up Wrong Prior Art Tree?
theodp writes "CNET reports on how Microsoft and the W3C are spotlighting old technology - Pei Wei's Viola browser and W3C staff member Dave Raggett's HTML+ specification - in an effort to defeat Eolas' Web patent. In his ruling, the Eolas judge agreed that a Wei presentation that included an interactive image of a chessboard came close to prior art, but explained that the late 1994 date of invention excluded it from the ambit of prior art. Perhaps the judge might have ruled differently had he been shown January 1994 correspondence between Tim Berners-Lee, Pei Wei, Dave Raggett, and others in response to a challenge to match the prior art of the interactive, networked games that were operational on the PLATO system in the 70s at the University of Illinois to make it possible to develop browser-based chess games." (Read on for more.)
theodp continues: "If they were up on PLATO history, Microsoft's lawyers could have shown the judge that operational prior art existed two decades earlier than Eolas', Wei's, and Raggett's efforts. Not only that, there are striking similarities between PLATO and Eolas patents. BTW, Eolas patent holder Michael Doyle obtained his degrees from the University of Illinois, where PLATO was developed and widely used."
Ah, Plato. No one ever talks about it so I always thought it was a local system. I used it when I was at the University of Lethbridge to send email to my brother at the University of Alberta (Edmonton) and to play this awesome (for the time) flight emulation program that was truly the first multiplayer game (of which I have any knowledge). This was back in 1982. Anyone know how many/which other universities had Plato terminals? I do remember the flight emulator getting slower and slower until it was no longer playable - possibly due to more people tying up the main frame. But the vector display rocked! I thought that that was the way to go for graphics.
Later, ('84), I used a logic program on Plato that would allow you to create circuits using NAND gates and JK Flipflops. That was fun but I remember not being able to save my work - at least not locally. Ahhhh, 8-bit nostalgia!