Microsoft Patents "Pg Up" and "Pg Dn"

Posted by kdawson on Sunday August 31, 2008 @12:49PM from the your-grandfather-had-prior-art dept.

An anonymous reader notes that Microsoft has been granted a patent on "Page Up" and "Page Down" keystrokes. The article links an image of an IBM PC keyboard from 1981 with such keys in evidence. "The software giant applied for the patent in 2005, and was granted it on August 19, 2008. US patent number 7,415,666 describes 'a method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed.'... The company received its 5,000th patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office in March 2006, and is currently approaching the 10,000 mark."

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The "t" util in Decus C had this... by Anonymous Coward · 2008-08-31 14:13 · Score: 5, Informative

...published, with source code, certainly by 1984 and maybe several years earlier.
The t utility did not use PgUp/PgDn keys, had some others since it was for most any crt terminal, but it had and used the concept and was certainly published and possible to date publication. There are funny rules about publication, but this is a well documented bit of code, for almost any machine that could compile C code, given away freely.