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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.
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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.
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.
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"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.
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"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.
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.
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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. (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.
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.)
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.
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.