Amiga Demonstration Helps Win Against Patent Troll

Amigan writes "Over on Groklaw, PJ is reporting that an actual demonstration of the Amiga OS (circa 1988) on an Amiga A1000 may have been the turning point in the lawsuit of IP Innovation v. Red Hat/Novell."

Comments

It's True.

[dangitman]

There's nothing that Amiga demos cannot accomplish. They are the stuff that drives our society forward.

Re:It's True.

[digitalchinky]

Although I saw my first piece of digital porn on the commodore 64 (Samantha fox if I recall) - it wasn't until the Amiga came along that I ~really~ saw porn, with actual skin tone. (Sheds a tear) It certainly drove my collection forward.

Re:It's True.

[EdIII]

As long as we are reminiscing of ye olden times in porn I remember when it was ground breaking to incrementally display the porn as it was being transferred over the modem. Ahhhh... the memories.

To this day that magical sound of two modems negotiating a connection gets me excited.

Re:It's True.

[MrHanky]

Nice comment, but I'm not sure you're speaking the absolute truth. John Carmack pretty much reinvented the side scroller for PC hardware with the Commander Keen series (scrolling is easy on the Amiga, but difficult to do well on a primitive EGA/VGA screen), and he wasn't an Amiga programmer. When he went on to make the more influential Wolfenstein and Doom, he still wasn't an Amiga programmer. On the demo scene, the legendary Future Crew apparently moved from the C64. Wing Commander, the game that finally took the computer gaming crown to the PC, was certainly not done in Amiga style -- it was full of DOS hacks, and the graphics didn't replicate any of the techniques made popular by the Amiga.

Re:It's True.

[ScrewMaster]

Former Amiga programmers realized

Look I was a game programmer back then, I worked on PC, Apple //, and Commodore 64-series products among others ... and you're just wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. I never did anything for the Amiga, and I find it kinda irritating that you believe programmers like me required Amiga experience in order to be good at our jobs. Geez, you Amiga guys sound like Mac fanboys sometimes. You just make shit up. I spent seven years before that failed attempt at a personal computer ever hit the market, hacking high-speed graphics code on a number of different microprocessors, and neither I nor my employers ever felt that I needed to learn to study the Amiga to write graphics an animation code for other systems.

You're giving all the credit to ex-Amiga coders for driving the game market forward and that's just ridiculous. Most of the guys I knew that bought into the Amiga hype went over to the Mac because they didn't want to be dealing with the bare metal. Most of them hadn't a clue what an I/O port was, much less how to screw around with refresh timing or anything else on a VGA card. They let the custom ASICs do all the work. Arcade game development on the IBM compatibles of the era was a lot like it was on the Apple ][ ... pretty much bare metal and raw assembler all the way through. That's because the CPU had to do everything, except maybe sound if you had an early Soundblaster. No fancy graphics or sound chips, no sirree.

The Amiga had many hardware and other advantages, and the reality is that experience with the Amiga's custom chips didn't count for SQUAT when it came to coding for what passed as video on PCs at the time. Matter of fact, the Amiga's hardware support spoiled the typical Amiga developer and put him at a distinct disadvantage when it came to working on the PC or Apple // lines. That's because many things that were easy on the Amiga took some very sharp, largely ex-Apple ][ programmers to do well on the PC.

That's the real history. You can assign credit any way you like, but those of us who were there will likely go all Guru Meditation on you.

Re:It's True.

[Rockoon]

No, it was not like HAM mode.

The IIgs's 3200 color mode literally had a unique 16 color palette for each and every scanline, hence 16 * 200 = 3200.

HAM had a 16 color (4-bit) palette for the entire screen, and then a pixel (which were 6-bit, not 4-bit) could be flagged to be a modification of the previous (from the scanline above) pixel color. HAM mode was an ugly thing to program for and was certainly not suitable for efficient rendering.

The IIgs thrived on its per-scanline capabilities. Each scanline could literally have a different palette and resolution.

It was lacking a blitter chip so was deficient compared to the amiga in 2D sprite based stuff, but it was much better at vector and 3D rendering (because of its Fill Mode) than the Amiga.

It also had 32 channel mono wavetable synthesis (16 stereo), compared to Amiga's 4 pannable mono channels.

So no, the Amiga was not way ahead of the pack in capabilities. The Amiga was good, but it really wasn't as special as Amiga users made it out to be. The Amiga had a much bigger install base so got a lot more games written for it. Apple was playing two-faced during this period, pushing the Mac instead of the IIgs.

Re:It's True.

[EdIII]

You reminded me of a story... of a long time ago.. in a far away place....

Normally I am very careful about posting real events that occurred in my life since I fanatically guard my privacy and anonymity.. but this needs to be told and it is time to tell it.

Quite a few years back I was attending a university and lived in a quasi-fraternity house off campus. One of my friends was in his room connected up to some chat service over the modem. I came in and sat down in the beginning of what turned out to be a horrifically depraved example of cyber sex.

Towards the end there were at least a dozen guys in the room and every one of us kept trying to one-up each other on what we thought we could get this chick to do. No webcams at this point in history, and I know our collective wisdom today sets off alarms like, "It's really a dude".

This chick was off the hook perverted. Depravity at a level you could only hope to find and marry as quick as possible. I think one dude passed out at some point (kidding). Finally one of us has the bright idea of asking her to do a file transfer over the modem with one of her pictures... naked. She agreed all too quickly.

Now there are about 12 guys pushing each other to get a prime viewing position for the monitor. Line by line the picture starts to form. It starts at the top of her head, we get to see her ears, and then........... the picture just keeps getting WIDER. It never got any thinner and her head was like the tip of an iceburg. Literally. .

Pandemonium ensues. After a minute or two of absolute hysterical laughter everyone but my friend and I are left in the room with the creature from beyond all comprehension staring at us from the monitor with 300 pounds of tits. I tell him not to feel bad and the best advice I could give him was to roll her in flour and find the wet spot. I then beat a hasty retreat.

It gets better.....

Two days later after, what is now simply referred to as "Cybersex with Godzilla", five us were in a fast food restaurant in the middle of the afternoon. My back was turned to the door and I remember that suddenly it seemed as if there was a total eclipse. My friends in front of me look they are in a state of total shock. I look behind me and see the entire frame of the door taken up by none other than Godzilla herself. She was 6'3" and at least 500 pounds. After literally squeezing through the door she made her way to the front to order the restaurant to go.

Guess who was with us? Yes... the man that started it all. What followed was a hushed and tense negotiation of what he was going to provide us over the next 30 days to NOT shout out his name and bail with the car.

To this day the only way I can explain how I felt about the whole thing was saying, "Imagine if you saw a picture of Sasquatch and you met it the very next day?".

Amiga demos rocked!

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Commodore has sushi and sold it as fish, sadly. The Amiga demos always kicked ass even if you weren't doing X.

Re:Amiga demos rocked!

[dangitman]

Eating meat raw has always been a sign of unsophistication in Western culture.

As the other reply notes - Steak Tartare and Carpaccio have long been considered at the heights of sophisticated Western dining.

Sushi became popular exactly because of this - by rejecting our own culture and embracing an alien one, you show how sophisticated and different you are from the masses. In addition, the high cost (in the 80s anyway) kept the morons out.

I don't buy this argument. Firstly, it contradicts itself - if you are eating a certain food just to show how different you are, doesn't that make you a moron? So if this were the case, wouldn't it be keeping the morons in?

I think there's a much simpler explanation - Globalization exposed people to different foreign cultures, and sushi is delicious. Over time, foreign foods become normalized. In the 1980s, there just weren't very many sushi restaurants outside of Japan, so few people got exposed to it. I very much doubt that most customers ate it simply to be snobby or different.

So what would be your current day example of such behavior? I mean, you don't see people going to, say, Danish restaurants and acting "oh, look how edgy and different I am eating this food that hardly anybody eats!"

The senator from Disney is needed

[AHuxley]

Enjoyed the ""Your honor, we shouldn't be required to look for prior art that precedes our invention, because shurely such prior art would be outdated and irrelevant"" comment.
Wont someone legislate to close this prior art loophole.

What's an Amiga?

[Itninja]

Seriously, is that some kind of Mexican Facebook?

Ahead of the curve

[hhawk]

I always loved the way the Amiga offered functions other computers of the same era never came close to matching..

I love the quote from the owner who produced the working model.. "My Amiga Killed a Troll!"

Re:Say what?

[LiquidCoooled]

Multiple screens and switching.

this was the original shout out requesting reader prior art:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071011205044141

about 10 comments into the discussion someone mentions this is exactly what the amiga had.

http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&sid=20071011205044141&title=M%24+Virtual+Desktop+Manager+licensed+by+IP+Innovation%3F&type=article&order=&hideanonymous=0&pid=634370#c634821

Re:MORE

[Fluffeh]

More prior art plskthx.

But that's the problem in itself right there. Yes, chances are that there is little "new" being done in software for the most part, and that someone has done [patent idea] before, but just imagine trying to find just the right bit of software, or just the right platform to show it's been done before.

The patent office couldn't instigate a "Prove no-one has done it before" process as that would be just ludicrous, but at the same time, having the right people on hand to show "just exactly where it HAS been done before" may not be 1) cheap, 2) practical and 3) possible.

There simply isn't an easy solution to this. If you abolish software patents, it makes it very difficult for companies to realistically spend millions on development of new concepts and ideas when someone can then just take the ground breaking UI or process etc. If you don't abolish patents, you still end up with the farcical joke that we have now.

Here, it really is a lose - lose scenario. Except if you are a patent lawyer.

Re:Say what?

[WrongSizeGlass]

The success is all very nice and all, but what was the disputed issue?

The actual dispute is irrelevant ... Linux won a patent suit and that's all we care about. A patent troll lost and will have to pay court costs. Double bonus points!

Here's the slashdot story about the court victory

Here's a link to the post that details the patents

OS-9

[markdavis]

Let us not forget that OS-9 was doing it before Amiga.... and that was also submitted by someone as prior art from 1983:

http://www.post-issue.org/prior_art/83/detail

OS-9 was my first "real" OS, before eventually switching to Unix, then Linux. Back in the day, it was extremely impressive.

Re:MORE

[RichardDeVries]

Those millions are spent on implementations, not on 'concepts and ideas'.

Upton Sinclair to the rescue by way of Al Gore

[jeko]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Re:MORE

[symbolset]

(Ecclesiastes 1:9-14 NIV) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. {10} Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. {11} There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.

citation

/I'm not prone to cite bible verse, but there you go. All your software patents are invalid. It sez so in the Good Book. The verse itself is an uncited theft of the work of Sophocles c. 429 BCE - himself a synthesist who didn't cite the vast realms of prior art from which he distilled his digests of the written and performed arts into their purest forms. Sophocles was a hack, but we don't have records of the prior art he stole, or today he'd be a pirate. His synthesis though? Timeless art in and of itself. It's good thing for us ancient Greece didn't have DMCA, DRM, and eternal copyright or he'd be Sophowho? To most he already is.

If only ancient Greece, or modern Phoenix, had a sort of distributed Library of Alexandria where one works could not be forgotten - where the wisdom of our fathers and their fathers (and their foolishness too) might be preserved and so remain available to our children and their children. Something like a Google for books. Alas, copyright prevents it and copyright is now eternal in every practical sense. So it is that each new generation, constrained by previously patented and copyrighted art has diminishing realms of imagination to work with - until the lawyers finally abolish imagination altogether and we reach the asymptote where creation ends. So then we lay upon our children the duty to rethink the thoughts we've had, to re-invent our inventions, and to do so in peril of the trolls who lay claim to a third degree ownership of any potential perceived reference to characters or invented places in a brief manuscript published in 100 copies only, 200 years before - and upon their children we lay a logarithmically greater burden.

As patents are the death of invention, copyrights are the death of art. A pity our children must climb these mountains we've built for them without the benefit of a culture, but culture itself is deprecated in this regime in preference to whatever mindless new drivel can escape lawsuits long enough to become popular - and then is itself extinguished in a flurry of lawyers and cocaine.

We might have stood on the shoulders of giants, but now we huddle in fear of lawyers.

Re:MORE

[shaitand]

Which is an illustration of the IP problem. A design is a textbook case of something which clearly belongs to copyright protection, not patent.

Re:Say what?

[dangitman]

You could slide each screen down by grabbing the bar at the top of the screen with your mouse, to reveal those beneath. So at times, and quite commonly, you would have different visible parts of your monitor displaying parts of screens with different resolutions (and, if I recall correctly, their own color depths as well).

That really was super-cool. I believe you are correct about the different color depths, too. There was just something compelling about that mechanism, it was like peeking behind a curtain to see backstage, perhaps? Maybe the youngsters would say it would be like seeing the matrix or something. It just had this incredible fluidity to it. Editing a document or program, and want to take a peek at how your 3D render in the background is going? Oooh... nice, just 8 more hours to go, looking good so far.