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."

Comments

Looks patentable to me

[cpu6502]

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.