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Microsoft's Decade-old Patent On Tree-view Mode!
BhaKi writes "Remember the Tree-View mode in many file management applications? It's shocking to know that this omnipresent feature was patented by Microsoft back in 1995 (granted in 1997). I'm not very sure about the implications, though. The patent is so general that it can be related to many things from tree-mode to virtual filesystems. Check out claim no. 3 of the patent for the most clear part."
I patented trees in general in 1992. I'm going to sue.
You can get patent results ad-free from Google or straight from the USPTO.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=uRkgAAAAEBAJ&dq=5689662
Hell, its vague enough to cover slashdot's hierarchical nesting message view. Pay up, slashy!
Table-ized A.I.
It appears we have stunning commentary on the nature of software patents. If a company, "first posts," if you will, they get the right to license the patent to others and sue those that don't pay them royalties. Truly, parent is a modern genius of metaphor.
hah
You must be new here
hah
epic fail.
Thank god for mc and ztree
Surely a family tree would be considered prior art? Just because a concept is in one of those complimicated nerdlinger putars doesn't make it unique!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_structure .. sounds like prior art to me! Also seems pretty obvious to me!
Good thing it's already over a decade old. That means it'll be coming into public domain anyway in a few years.
Good thing patents haven't been made nearly eternal, like copyright has. I'm sure it's only a matter of time, though. Then we can really kiss any innovation in this country goodbye.
provided a navigable file system browser for DOS - tree view of directory in the left pane, list of files in the currently selected directory on the right.
It was a best-selling product, too.
A few years later (but before 1995), IIRC Lotus Notes had a navigational pane in its client. I doubt it was even the first app to use that - it was just sort of common wisdom among UI designers at the time.
My head is going to explode!
E.g. swing on vms sig tapes, back in 1980s, published with source. Limited width due to
terminal size, but functions were there.
But microsoft needs lots of defensive patents, gets sued by trolls all the time.
Hopefully new USPTO position about software that does nothing material and only is for general purpose machines not being patentable will hold. That would clear out many junk patents.
I have to give MS kudos for not using this patent offensively.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I'm pretty sure I was using something very much like what's described in point #3 back in the DOS days with Norton (or its clone Volkov) Commander.
There's so much prior art here it's not funny. For example, Executive Systems first published XTree for DOS (later XTreeGold) in April, 1985. It was the absence of this functionality in MS/DOS that make the functionality so popular. This is just another example of how the software patent system is truly messed up and needs (and hopefully will get) a serious overhaul.
well, considering norton xtree used this in the late 80's, a helluva case can be made for previous use.
stupid IP patents need to just go away. this is retarded.
Generally, very little. Yes, most low-level things in CS have been patented in some sense (XOR cursors, one-click checkout, run-length image encoding, multi-hash lookup, stacktrace error display strategies.)
In theory, all software development grinds to a halt. In practice, no one gives a damn.
Trying to enforce a very broad software patent usually just gets the entire patent invalidated. Even if you win, you get to play whack-a-mole with a thousand open-source projects. And most software is bespoke stuff within corporations: good luck tracking that down to enforce patent claims.
Unless you are a law firm with the business model of extorting cash for infringment, you lose by going to court. Bad press, skeptical judge (unless you are suing a direct competitor,) workarounds from the peanut gallery provided pro-bono, countersuits from others with overlapping clainms: it gets ugly fast. Better to just cross-license and get on with life.
That's interesting, because a virtually identical view was available in a Wang Laboratories software product called Clearview, released in 1989, which ran on Windows 2.0.
(Clearview was one of a genre of Windows add-ons, HP NewWave being probably the best known, that plastered improved graphics shells or desktop managers on top of Windows).
And Clearview itself was nothing more than an improved version of a directory display that was used in the Wang Laboratories OIS circa 1977. They were logically the same, although visually different because the OIS was constrained by having a character-oriented screen. At least within Wang itself, Clearview's directory display was regarded a spiffy bitmapped graphic version of the OIS's display.
I seriously doubt that Wang was first or even close to first, but Wang was definitely shipping large numbers of commercial products that offered tree views of directories long before 1995.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This patent isn't just about trees, or even file-system trees (which Microsoft made prior art for with the old Win3.1 File Manager). This is about file-system trees that also include things that aren't actually in the file system. It's about how things like Control Panel and My Network Places can appear in the same Windows Explorer tree with your C: drive.
Hopefully, though, the whole thing is now moot.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Perhaps Slashdot story submitters should have to certify that their understanding of patent law comes from something more than perusing the musing of RMS at the League for Programming Freedom. A short course in claim construction would help in differentiating between broad patents that cover something commonly used and narrow patents that are easy to avoid.
The claims of this patent all include the limitation of a "name space extension" that adds at least one "non-file system object" to the file system display. For example, opening a zip file as a folder is an example of adding a non-file system object. If it was part of the shell, instead of an extension to the shell, then the shell probably would not infringe. The capability of extension by third-party vendors is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Windows Explorer.
There may be prior art that invalidates this patent (after all, prior art can be in any language, any time before invention). But, it would have to be prior art that reads on the narrow scope of this patent, not the bizarre, broad interpretation offered by the submitter and by /. commentators.
.
Everything looks obvious in retrospect.
But you aren't patenting an idea. You are patenting a workable implementation of that idea.
It doesn't matter that Dick Tracy has a two-way wrist radio in 1946 or Maxwell Smart a shoe phone in 1965 - even when the theatrical prop sells for $39,000 on eBay.
What matters is that your work contributes to the evolution of a real-life cellular phone and cellular network.
This is about file-system trees that also include things that aren't actually in the file system.
You mean things like devfs, procfs, and tmpfs?
Tick the "Post Anonymously" box next time.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Looks reminiscent of the Structured Visual Navigation Widget from 1994, and SVN itself is older than that. And there are certainly various apparently-similar displays around various DECwindows and X Window applications.
I notice a lot of people tend to make really really really generic patents these days, presumably to give them more control over who they get to sue, but when it comes to Prior art, does just one instance invalidate the whole patent, or does it only invalidate certain aspects of it?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I had a real ugly dog, so ugly that we had to shave his ass and teach him to walk backwards, ,otherwise other dogs and people avoided him completely.
this together with tying a pork chop around his neck to get the other dogs to play with him ,
Improved his quality of life and desirability considerably. .
In looking for patent violations I found
1) Shaving the ass of anything alive or dead is patented, by some sheep herder
2) Walking backwards due to physical repulsiveness is patented and requires that you use their prosthetic device snd pay them a
fee for using it
3) Affixing anything edbile to any living thing to make it more desirable in any way is also patented
So I had to shoot the dog when I was sued for 2 of the 3 violations above
I saved myself $ 10,000 in lawsuits but paid a fine of $30,000 for shooting the dog,
The above showes how the economics of patents work .
To win any patent is simple Econmics
You must just have MUCH more money than those who take claim to it
IT Doesn't matter at all who is right
Wealth always PROVES RIGHT is the message sent by the US courts.
Sure it's "shocking" - but it's only news if you've been off-world for the last decade or so and weren't aware that the patent system had long since been brought into disrepute and turned into a tool for extortionists and thieves. Microsoft - hardly the only offender - has applied for many such patents (RSS feed subscription, BlueJ, Enlightenment-style pager, extended clipboard formats, tabbing through links, auto-adding 'www','.com' etc. in URL inputs...) and has been granted many of them. What is special about this one? Now?
In a bizarro world, it's conceivable that MS patented this rather over-broad patent to prevent getting Patent Trolled.
prior art from 1986 Plan 9 V 1.0
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The first thing I ever did when I was on a system with 'mc' was to add
alias mc mv
into my ~/.tcshrc - One loose keytap and suddenly my whole terminal exploded with weird stuff happening. It was even worse when you're on dialup over a 9600 baud line to a unix box at the university.
[insert deity] I loathed that program, if only for its name.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Your post certainly raises the UNIX concept that everything is a file. That old UNIX idea really lies at the core of this patent. Oh wait, I meant was trivially extended by the concept of a tree view. Oh wait, midnight commander started presenting non-file objects (/dev/null and friends) in a tree view in which year?
Blah. Software Patents suck. Bogus ones suck more.
as a node at a level where it is not in the FS
You know, there is this old family of operating systems dating back from the early 70s, that tend to represent pretty much everything as a file system, even things that aren't necesarily on the disk like processes or more recently USB devices.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
there is no tree view widget on the mac (neither carbon nor cocoa)?
I can't help but notice that there is a tree view on Linux.
I'm no supporter of Microsoft, but I have to point out that they didn't set out to patent item #3.
Patents list claims which each build on each other - the real meat of what they would sue for is in the later bits (which build on the broad points earlier up the list).
The broad claims near the top of the list are not the target of the patent - it's the really specific stuff near the bottom which are the 'novel claims'.
The little known computer language Mumps (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multiprogramming System - http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane) implemented all these claims 30 years earlier. Documentation from that earlier era pretty much shows all the features that M$ appears to be claiming. Another case of M$'s deja vu all over again?
Kevin O'Kane http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane/
I always liked the TREE command in DOS. Is there a similar command in UNIX?
The Admin and the Engineer
You live in a tree? Me NOT Jane, you Tarzan?
Causes the people you sue raise more cash than you spend in defending from the claim to get it invalidated.
Worse, if you spend too much defending from patents, you're doing your bottom line no good.
Hi. I have a book that lists a tree file structure. It came long before 1995 (or even 1985). Can I call microsofts patent dead now, or do you want me to send the name of the book, publisher, author, publication date, etc.?
Burroughs (now Unisys) CANDE (command and edit language) had this feature in 1969.
From reading that description, the patent seems to be about adding non-file object to the filesystem view, like the "my computer" icon, or when you go into a .zip file and get to explore it like it was a directory. Did I miss something?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
What do you mean? Of course they "set out to patent item #3" - surely you don't think it got in there by accident!
Yes they are "the target". Claims 1,7,10 are the independent claims. If you infringe any one of them, you infringe it irrespective of whether or not you infringe any other of the claims. If any claim does not claim a novel invention, it can be invalidated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claim_(patent)
Tree view existed in DOS apps too. Anyone else remember KAMAS, the outlining program? it dates to 1987, and I doubt it was the first.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
... broken even back then.
There were numerous DOS utilities for managing files that used a tree display with a window where the details could be viewed. Xtree was one of them, if memory serves, and I'm pretty sure that the early versions of Norton's Utilities had something like this as well. (Wasn't NU's little tool the inspiration for Midnight Commander?) They might qualify as prior art. They were certainly in wide use before 1995. Microsoft may not have even been the first to do this in a GUI. I'd bet that Desqview (technically not a GUI, I guess but darned close), Desqview/X, or GEM had used this method of viewing the contents of directories. Both pre-date 1995 as well.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
The rest of the patent is very general and unclear. But the claim no. 3 is specifically and clearly about a tree-view widget (not necessarily about file-management). Look at digikam, for example. As mentioned in that claim, I can select a directory from the tree-view widget in the left part of the software and the right part shows the photos in that directory.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
I loved the seamless way you could navigate the entire directory structure, and dip down into the files themselves without waiting around.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Remember? What the heck do you mean by "remember? The tree view in a file system is ubiquitous for GUIs viewing the file system. I'm not talking about Windoze either. Both GTK+ and Qt have it in their file dialogs. It's in Konqueror, Dolphin, Nautilus and Thunar. Even the Mac Finder has it. The reason it is there is that the tree view is appropriate for viewing tree structures.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
This is so typical of slashdot patent troll arguments. You focus on one claim, ignoring the fact that individual claims are irrelevant. A patent must be taken *AS A WHOLE*. The claims are logically and'd, not or'd. All claims must be true for the patent to be enforceable. This patent does *NOT* patent general filesystem trees, that's merely one of the claims that must be true for the patent to be enforceable.
Patents are written from general to specific, with each claim becoming more and more specific. Thus you could see a patent that goes like this:
1. A computer system ...
2. Claim 1 where the computer system is green.
3. Claim 2 where a clown tap dances
4. Claim 3 where Elmer Fudd shoots himself in the face
Now, the typical slashdot patent troll would scream "ZOMG, they've patented the color green!!!!!!1111"
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Sure there is a tree view in MAC OS X - it is merged with the details (list) view. Open a folder in list view and click on the little triangle.
Martin
Thanks for clarifying that. Still OS/2 2.0, released in April 1992, had the ability to display "non file system object". Any (former) OS/2 developer (or user with knowledge of low lever working) will tell you that what you just described it is the main feature which makes the OS/2 workplace shell the best GUI shell ever.
As for handling ZIP: IBM never bothered but it was available to the WPS as third-party extension.
Martin
I have an old VMS script I wrote to generate a graphical display a directory tree. From the opening comments:
$! tree.com - show tree structure of sub-directories
$!
$! 6-JUL-1987 wh early version
$! 27-NOV-1997 wh overcome VMS 8-subdirectory limit ?
I am pretty sure there was a version on the DECUS tapes, too.
This is over 20 years old. Any patentability should be pretty much worn out by now.
I don't see the relevance of "well UNIX has been placing all devices in the filesystem for decades".
FYI, in addition of "/dev/" which *is* a directory on the file system (but contains special files to communicates with the hardware), there are other things that *are not* in the file system.
The patent covers including things which aren't in the filesystem as part of the tree view.
There are entry point in the tree like "/proc" which aren't in the file system at all.
Instead they use a special module called PROCFS (it's a file system drive in unix world, and pretty much equivalent to the the extension that the patent mentions : both can be used to make structures not on a disk appear as directory-like tree)
and expose a complete directory-like structure which in fact doesn't represent files, but represent processes, kernel status, etc.
See the above post for a reference on a paper about how exposing processes with an interface that look likes files.
In short : if there's a directory called "/dev/snd/" this directory exists because it is on the EXT2 partition mounted there. The directory "/proc/kernel/" exist because the procfs modules makes it available. It has no existance on the disk.
Similar mapping of abstract concept into something that "looks like a directory tree" is very popular in unix.
More recent example are pts which is used to represent the various (virtual) terminals in directory-like fashion structure. usb exposing the topology of usb devices. Also sysfs in linux is used to represent pretty much anything internel of the kernel like system drivers.
Most of the example I give are recent (usbfs and sysfs are post 95), but they are representative of a tendency that has existed in Unix for a long time because it was in its design.
The patent covers the software mecanism which covers the possibility that was introduced in Windows 1995:
Using a simple file browsing software like Explorer, you access a single tree structure which can hold both actual elements on the disk like "Desktop -> My Computer -> C:" (gives access to a physical partition), and things that are actually abstract element made visible in the same tree "Desktop -> My Computer -> Control Pannel -> {some settings}" (whose functionality is coincidentally is pretty much close to what Linux's recent "sysfs" or parts of the mid-80s old unix "procfs" where created to do).
(And somewhere in between, the case of network resources, which are remote resource made visible in the local tree : Windows' "Desktop -> Network Neighbourhood -> {variable number of indirections depending on Windows version} -> {server} -> {ressource}" is exactly functionally equivalent to a unix' mounted remote file system)
So in short, my opinion about the patent :
"Congratulation, you've successfully described something that has been in Unix for the past 25 years"
----
In fact Unix' original implementation is much closer to what the patent describes than Windows 95 (that microsoft where trying to patent) : /proc really exposes things that where never part of the file system to begin with.
Speaking of system settings and internal data
Whereas the functionally equivalent "Desktop -> My Computer -> Control Pannel" trick simply lists all ".cpl" files in "\\windows\\system[32]\\". It's not an extension that make out-of-filesystem object visible in the tree, it's simply a thing that acts as a filter for files already elsewhere on the same system.
In addition, the old unix implementation I am referring to is better integrated in the OS. Anything made available in the tree using a special filesystem driver that exposes abstract things instead of actual filesystems, is instantly made available to any of the usual tools (including command-line tools) used to ha
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Which was first? The patent or the lawsuit ? ...
geeks unite, divided we >>/dev/null
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