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Woz and the RCA Character-generator Patent
doperative writes with this quote from Steve Wozniak:
"A lot of patents are pretty much not worth that much ... In other words, any fifth-grader could come up with the same approach ... And then we find out RCA has a patent on a character generator for any raster-scanned setup .. And they patented it at a time when nobody could have envisioned it really being used or anything ... and they got five bucks for each Apple II, based on this little idea that's not even an idea. Y'know: store the bits, store the bits, then pop in a character on your TV."
A text based display would have been completely non-obvious at a time when everything was coming out on paper tapes, with maybe a 7 segment vfd here and there.
Are you that retarded? Or that young?
Could someone explain to me why we store twice before popping??
"store the bits, store the bits, then pop in a character on your TV."
He might also want to have a word with his old buddy Steve Jobs too. Apple has been getting meaningless patents left and right, just like MS and all these other corps. And at least Allen and Gates are using some of their ridiculous money for charity. What exactly has Jobs been doing to innovate, or contribute to the world?
I love Woz, but if he's going to criticize, he needs to include his old friends and not just his old enemies.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'd be interested to know when they filed that patent.
The BBC had Teletext from about 1972, according to Wikipedia, which used exactly this setup. Anyone who saw the Dr. Who story "Robots of Death" (Jan 1977) or other stories from that era may have noticed the computer displays which also used teletext or a similar system. I think there were already ICs on the market to implement it for you, probably because of the teletext industry.
According to Wikipedia:
By the end of production in 1993, somewhere between five and six million Apple II series computers (including about 1.25 million Apple IIGS models) had been produced.
Not counting Apple IIGS, that is $30 million dollars in patent fees to IBM at $5 a unit.
Better known as 318230.
RCA's patent dates to an era (1940s) when just putting an image on a screen was a challenge, and overlaying it with characters was like magic.
They deserved the credit for putting letters on 50s-era TVs just as much as they deserved credit for developing NTSC-II (i.e. color). If you put in years of effort into experimentation, you deserve the reward of a temporary monopoly on your discovery. IMHO.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Maybe we should just abolish the patent system to make the fucktards on this site happy... It's perfectly patentable, but you don't think it's anything original. Where do you draw the line?
Battlestar Galactica (the original in 1978) had a similar thing going when the captain (Lorne Greene) would speak, the words of his journal would appear on the screen.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
The point though is they didn't. I believe this is called the Tetris moment.
When Tetris came out everyone was "That is so simple, anyone could of thought up that game". But the fact is they didn't. Same with patents. Obvious after the fact is not the same as obvious.
"In other words, any fifth-grader could come up with the same approach."
I've seen them vaquish some formidable foes on AYSTAF.
Yes. You're right. However, patents don't seem to work very well. They are meant to reward inventors by giving them a temporary monopoly on their invention in exchange for full disclosure of their invention. The problem is that patents do not succeed in their purpose of dissemination. Patents are worded in a way that obscures what an invention is and how it can be applied. Some of this is deliberate and some of it because of the way patents have to be phrased. In this case for example, it is likely that Woz thought of the idea and re-invented it entirely from scratch before RCA came round and went "ahem! we have a patent. Give us some royalties.". The problem is that Woz couldn't prove he came up with the idea himself and had to open Apples cheque book to RCA.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Well, that's actually the story of the Egg of Columbus.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"And they patented it at a time when nobody could have envisioned it really being used or anything ...
Seems like it wasn't obvious, then.
and they got five bucks for each Apple II, based on this little idea that's not even an idea. Y'know: store the bits, store the bits, then pop in a character on your TV."
The Apple II originally sold for $1298 with 4k of RAM and $2638 with 48k. $5 is only .3% of the price. That doesn't seem that unreasonable.
Also, if it was so unreasonable, and was just a little idea "that's not even an idea," why not just design around it?
The RCA character-generator patent was an example of a patent, from Wozniak's point of view, that the aforementioned fifth-grader could have come up with. "I don't know any other way you could do it
That's why... He couldn't come up with any other way. So, the reasonable royalty now seems really reasonable.
Reminds me of a dot matrix display demo board I used once.
Problem was they pirated a font table to map the alphabet in row/column order.
But the controller chip required the font in column/row format.
So they hand translated enough characters to display their company name correctly,
and when used the same function to print our company name we got half the characters
(those missing from their name) as jibberish!
Management happened by and was so impressed!
FTFA:
>> But it wasn't Double Cream Blueberry that attracted Woz & Co. "Marie Callender's has split-pea soup, split-pea soup with the ham."
I actually once worked with an early RCA chipset for running low-res CRT images. One nice thing about it was you could sync the display generator to the NTSC signal and so overlay your own pattern very precisely on a TV picture. RCA at least did produce and sell hardware that embodied their invention.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Even if he could prove independent invention, that only changes it from wilful infringement to infringement.
"Data General also contends that the Cole patent was anticipated by the prior art and by a printed publication stored at the Stanford Research Institute. Finally, Data General asserts that the Cole patent is invalid under 35 U.S.C. ? 103 because it was obvious in light of the pertinent prior art. The Court will now examine each of these challenges to Cole's validity" link
Which of course has a person giving the impression that a non-modified egg is to be used, then promptly modifying their egg.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
... do we stop glorifying formerly brilliant inventors as sages? Just because you were once brilliant does not mean everything you do is brilliant.
I give you Donald Trump as an example. Crazy is crazy is crazy, and Woz is going grumpy senile fast. He thinks he has all the answers to children's education and now patents. So he made a successful computer. That was decades ago. Now, everytime he whines, he get's a /. story. Drop him in the spam bin already!
I8-D
The following stuff is from Electronics magazine, Jan. 3rd 1958 issue .. Generating Characters: Summary Although may plans have been devised in the past for scribing numeric and alphabetic characters on a scope face by spot deflection" link
As someone who has done a fair bit of inventing and patenting, I find generalized disdain for patented inventions to be a little irritating. (This is apart from arguments about whether intellectual property is a proper category or whether its legal protection is a good idea). Yes, many patents may have titles that make them sound trivial, and quick reads of them may make you snigger. But in the U.S., one criterion for ruling against patentability is that "the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains" (35 U.S.C. 103 (A)). I think most of my patent submissions have been initially rejected as "obvious" (one particularly entertaining case was a patent examiner's note that the shape of the recording elements in my magnetic head bore remarkable similarity to a piece of plastic someone had devised to keep a garden hose from snagging on the tire while you're washing your car). However, arguing against an "obviousness" claim is straightforward:
1. Prove that the problem has been recognized for some time;
2. Show that engineers have attempted a variety of solutions to the known problem;
3. Clearly explain how your own invention's method for solving the problem is different from existing solutions.
Of course, this doesn't do anything to prove that the invention is useful, actually does solve the problem, can be reduced to practical form, etc. It just demonstrates that the invention was not obvious at the time. It also does not mean the inventor is a genius or that nobody else on the planet could come up with the solution. It just means that it may qualify to be a patentable invention.
My own favorite case of proving non-obviousness to myself was having a renowned engineer in the field look at my proposal and tell me that he was quite sure it could not possibly work, though he could not exactly explain why. A couple of weeks later we met in the hall with him telling me that he had been intrigued enough to run simulations while I was building a prototype. We both came to the conclusion that it indeed could and did work.
Lots of crazy stuff gets patented all the time, but the process of describing and justifying an invention as such is...not completely obvious.
Character generators were big business for cable television operators. Before computers were so ubiquitous the need to show text on the screen was a challenge. They needed one for each channel that was to show text, especially for public access channels and their schedules. Later, special units were designed for use by The Weather Channel that would genlock and overlay the text onto the video.
Today only a few people remember how difficult it once was to get text on a television screen. As a kid I remember watching U/A Columbia's public access channel schedule update. Someone was typing into it and directly changed what you see on the screen as they typed it. I guess they're supposed to do that when the channel is off-air or at 4:00 AM.
Kriston
RCA developed this for NBC's election returns. Election nights used to have huge rooms of electromechanical display boards. NBC wanted something better. So they had RCA develop a character generator, to be used in conjunction with election predictions made on RCA computers. "Makes your television set a part of the computer".
Previously, there had been stroke character displays for vector CRTs. SAGE used those. There was the Charactron tube, where a focused electron beam was steered through a stencil of letters, then aimed at the screen. There was something called the Monoscope, which was a TV-camera like tube with a permanently fixed stencil as the image. There were flying-spot scanners, where you put a slide in front of a CRT, and a phototube read the changing light, generating a video signal. All these devices were either limited or expensive. (A 21-inch Charactron tube was six feet long.) Generating character video in real time, entirely electronically, was a big deal at the time.
(I've been trying to find video on line of the NBC election coverage with this.)
between being expendable and having finished the previous set of tasks that were assigned to you.
It wasnt too useful if there was not place to store the character patterns. Until the price of memory fell below ten cents a bit (!!) in the early 1970s it was just too expensive to store these bits in a personal user terminal or personal computer. It takes about 2000 bits to store the printing ASCII 5x7 raster array. I was present at the transition from teletype terminals to CRT terminals at this time and the introduction of personal computers.
The RCA patent was known as the Cole patent -- RCA went after everybody that did raster-scan displays at the time. This patent was invalidated by the courts -- twice -- the second time it stayed dead. Apple paid some money to RCA, but that's a long story in and of itself.
Woz had three early Apple patents -- two on the way color was generated on the motherboard, and one on the disk controller. Woz figured out how to do NTSC color video, including the color burst, with almost no parts. Woz developed an incredibly clever way to do a GCR disk controller with a few $ of parts when everybody else in the industry was doing MFM and MMFM using expensive disk controller chips.
When Apple was faced with an onslaught of cheap clones of the Apple ][ coming in from Taiwan and Hong Kong in the early 1980's, it was the Woz patents that made the difference in protecting the Apple ][ line, and the company.
You know, I thought I was going to be able to challenge the remark about Jobs' philanthropic endeavors, but every time I searched, the answer was the same: he doesn't do charity.
Does anyone know if Apple ever restarted their charitable contributions group that He killed off in the "Dark Times"?
It was possible before His return for employees to suggest charities for Apple to make donations to, and Apple matched
contributions employees made to charitable organizations.
A patent should only count if the firm holding it has an actual product on the market, or at least give the patent holder 1 year from a request to use the patent, to release a product using it. After that one year the applicant should be free to use the patent. But i guess you can't really know which patents you might infringe when making something. In my opinion there should be no patents, why not compete on better products and support.. ?
That was the beauty of the Cole patent and the raster-scan character generator chip! One chip contained the character generator ROM and the high-speed shift register, so you addressed it with the character code and the raster line and shifted out the row of bits to the CRT. You didn't have to clock your memory at the raster's bit-clock; only a portion of the raster scan character generator chip had to run that fast.
Some of those early 80x24 CRT displays used boards full of shift registers to store character data for the display. (I had to maintain a room full of Datapoint terminals used in the uni's timesharing lab in the early 70's.) Later they went to DRAMs.
Still a 9600-baud Datapoint terminal was much preferable than an old, stinking, noisy 110-baud Teletype 33!
"The district court found that the Cole claims in suit read on a system disclosed in German, French, and British patents issued to Dirks between 1948 and 1957, none of which were considered by the examiner during the prosecution of the Cole patent application. The district court agreed with HLA's assertion that "The Dirks system ... is the Cole system implemented in 1940's technology, and, since the Cole claims are drawn to cover all digital systems generically, as opposed to a new implementation, they are anticipated by [the] foreign Dirks' patents"
The principal issue in Appeal No. 83-782 is whether the district court correctly found that claims 1, 2, and 3 of RCA's patent, covering a digital video character generator, are anticipated by the disclosure in the "Dirks" patents. We reverse the holding of invalidity in view of Dirks alone link
"Data General also contends that the Cole patent was anticipated by the prior art and by a printed publication stored at the Stanford Research Institute" link
"The following stuff is from Electronics magazine, Jan. 3rd 1958 issue .. Generating Characters: Summary Although may plans have been devised in the past for scribing numeric and alphabetic characters on a scope face by spot deflection" link
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"Cole at RCA developed the technology as part of a response to an FAA RFQ .. a long, long, time ago, back in the dark ages, the 1970's. In the decades of litigation which followed, RCA's FAA bid proved to be the undoing of the Cole patent", sillivalley
Do you have any citations for all this?
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> As someone who has done a fair bit of inventing and patenting, I find generalized disdain for patented inventions to be a little irritating, robbarrett
What have you invented that we would have heard of?
> Of course, this doesn't do anything to prove that the invention is useful, actually does solve the problem, can be reduced to practical form, robbarrett
If something can't be rendered in 'practical form', can it be an actual 'invention' ?
Which does not negate the fact that it was also an obvious technology.
Its only obvious technology to someone today who has been trained in the technology. You are blinded in a way by hindsight. To someone with the education and technology of the 1960s things are quite different.
It is also apparent that RCA, "a technology visionary", patented the thing with the intent of trolling, since at the time they had no use for their "invention".
No, its "obvious" what they were thinking. As a major TV manufacturer they were thinking of a feature where they could overlay text on the normal image, news headlines, stock market quotes, etc. No need for the broadcast network to do such things. Have this text broadcast on a newly assigned frequency and let the customer select what info, if any, to be displayed on whatever channel they are watching. Now that I have planted this meme in your head isn't it "obvious" they may have had some possible applications. That's how hindsight colors the perception of the past.
I'm not sure if the SWTP TV Typewriter was out before the Apple II, but it also used the same ideas for putting characters on a TV screen. So did EVERY terminal ever made from Hazeltines to DEC VT100's. Did RCA grab a chunk of their hides too? (And if RCA's patent was still good when the PC came out IBM would have had to pay them off too....except in this case they probably just cross licensed some IBM patent that RCA was in violation off).
Apple isn't running a patent troll shop by any stretch of the imagination. They patent their creativity embodied in real products to protect them from copy cats.
Apple has driven the whole industry for 30 years for setting the benchmark on how we interact with devices, They have set the standard for computers, music, phones, and tablets. And the industry follows.
The iPhone was introduced 3 years ago. For 20 years there wasn't anything like an iPhone, now every phone out there is an iPhone look alike. It is so pervasive that people can't even remember what phones were like before the iphone.
I agree that patents are good vehicles for protection of your ideas. However, I think the current controversy hinges on this:
1. Are you contributing to a productive world and utilizing your patent to protect a device or product you or a licensee are actually making.
2. Or are you just churning out patents for things your never intend to use, but are gambling that through law suits you can make money.
If it is the second option, that represents a type of "anti-creativity" and "anti-productivity" that just bogs the world down slows down the pace of innovation.
"I don't know any other way you could do it – anybody would have come up with that with the same approach."
Woz states it is an obvious method, which means the patent is invalid, right? So why were they forced to pay $5 on every Apple II again?
Twinstiq, game news
887 F.2d 1056, 12 U.S.P.Q.2d 1449
Wrote the TV typewriter book in 1976 or so, and I bet he didn't pay any patent royalty. At the time, as Wiki says, it was a medium challenging thing to make for a hobbyist, took a fair chunk of TTL logic and some space on a WW board. I know, I made one, and at the time the other stuff you could get were ASR-33 teletypes or a very expensive terminal that used special fast logic to get more than 40 chars on a screen. Mine got hooked to my PDP-8 (there weren't uP's like now)....
At the time, rom and pixel rates made this actually fairly hard to do well and keep up with TV refresh rates with any resolution.
Here's the Wiki page.
Sure, guys were doing it for the military earlier, much -- they had access to logic we normal folks couldn't get or afford. Now, get off my lawn.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!