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

store twice, then pop??

[mehrotra.akash]

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."

Don't stop at Paul Allen

[elrous0]

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.

Re:So uhh

[k_187]

Because there's a good chance that just paying the 5 bucks was cheaper. Wikipedia says that between 5 and 6 million Apple II's were sold. Assuming 5.5 million were sold and that all of them are affected by this patent, that's 27.5 million over 16 years as opposed to a patent lawsuit up front and missing out on the first few years of sales.