The patent laws and procedures are very clear about not being able to patent anything that has been published or publicly exists (that is, for sale) as prior art.
Actually, that's not quite true. Bizarrely, in the US you are allowed to publish up to 12 months before filing. Which doesn't make any sense, but there you go.
Yes, of course, as the US system (in contrast with the rest of the world) is based on first to invent rather than first to file. If you can show you invented it first, even though someone else filed it first, you win. Of course none of this has to do with this particular case.
However, my point had more to do with what was considered "prior art".
The lawyer is correct in that when you initially submit a patent, the examiner quite often just invalidates some or all of the claims and then you have to work with them to show why they are valid. As I understand it, they sometimes do that just to reduce their workload.
But it seems that revoking a patent is a pretty serious matter (since it has only been done in 151 patents), that has no relation to the standard process. So what the lawyer is saying is essentially nonsense. Given the prior art is so compelling and strong, from the USPTO standpoint, this seems over. The patent laws and procedures are very clear about not being able to patent anything that has been published or publicly exists (that is, for sale) as prior art.
PDP-8/i 24K timesharing system w/16 users
on
First Computers
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· Score: 1
Back in 1972 at my junior high school we had this computer for the students in all of the high schools and junior high schools. Each school had an ASR-33 teletype with a 110 baud acoustical coupler and an 8 bit paper tape punch.
Anyone remember the red "Introduction to Programming" paperbacks from digital? They were after the orange ones.
The PDP-8 was a 12 bit word machine with 8 instructions in its machine language. Each user got to run in a 4K address space that was swapped by the timesharing system (TSS/8).
We programmed in basic of course and played lunar lander.
Interestingly, I went to work for the school district and found a program that you could use to play 4 part harmonies on a radio placed on top of the CPU. It was an assembler program, so you had to put the note values in as numeric values and it would flash the register lights on the front panel. I programmed the first movement of the Brandenberg Concerto #3 and National Emblem march.
I then moved to work on the district's main computer, a PDP-10KA with 128K 36 bit words of memory and VT-05 terminals. We were a pretty advanced school district back then. All of the character data was in 6-bit encoding, only upper case. And everything was in COBOL except for some assembler.
This is when I'm productive. I'm excited about what I'm doing. I'm really into it. I don't know how to explain it otherwise. The funny thing is that I can go from one moment being totally unexcited and the next moment really wanting to work.
I work by myself at home on software for my own company, so I have no deadlines, except those imposed by my desire to eat.
There are sometimes (usually late at night) when I'm tremendously productive. Then other times, where I have to force myself to work.
The thing is, I don't know the magic that makes me "really on". And I do know that it is probably better for me *not* to be working when I'm not in that condition. I also think there is a limited amout of time you can be in that state; one must have downtime.
And of course, its probably true that I'm "really on" only about 20% of the time, but I have not kept track. That would be interesting to do... And also track how much time I spend working when I'm not interested.
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Actually, that's not quite true. Bizarrely, in the US you are allowed to publish up to 12 months before filing. Which doesn't make any sense, but there you go.
Yes, of course, as the US system (in contrast with the rest of the world) is based on first to invent rather than first to file. If you can show you invented it first, even though someone else filed it first, you win. Of course none of this has to do with this particular case.
However, my point had more to do with what was considered "prior art".
But it seems that revoking a patent is a pretty serious matter (since it has only been done in 151 patents), that has no relation to the standard process. So what the lawyer is saying is essentially nonsense. Given the prior art is so compelling and strong, from the USPTO standpoint, this seems over. The patent laws and procedures are very clear about not being able to patent anything that has been published or publicly exists (that is, for sale) as prior art.
Back in 1972 at my junior high school we had this computer for the students in all of the high schools and junior high schools. Each school had an ASR-33 teletype with a 110 baud acoustical coupler and an 8 bit paper tape punch.
Anyone remember the red "Introduction to Programming" paperbacks from digital? They were after the orange ones.
The PDP-8 was a 12 bit word machine with 8 instructions in its machine language. Each user got to run in a 4K address space that was swapped by the timesharing system (TSS/8).
We programmed in basic of course and played lunar lander.
Interestingly, I went to work for the school district and found a program that you could use to play 4 part harmonies on a radio placed on top of the CPU. It was an assembler program, so you had to put the note values in as numeric values and it would flash the register lights on the front panel. I programmed the first movement of the Brandenberg Concerto #3 and National Emblem march.
I then moved to work on the district's main computer, a PDP-10KA with 128K 36 bit words of memory and VT-05 terminals. We were a pretty advanced school district back then. All of the character data was in 6-bit encoding, only upper case. And everything was in COBOL except for some assembler.
What a geek...
This is when I'm productive. I'm excited about what I'm doing. I'm really into it. I don't know how to explain it otherwise. The funny thing is that I can go from one moment being totally unexcited and the next moment really wanting to work.
I work by myself at home on software for my own company, so I have no deadlines, except those imposed by my desire to eat.
There are sometimes (usually late at night) when I'm tremendously productive. Then other times, where I have to force myself to work.
The thing is, I don't know the magic that makes me "really on". And I do know that it is probably better for me *not* to be working when I'm not in that condition. I also think there is a limited amout of time you can be in that state; one must have downtime.
And of course, its probably true that I'm "really on" only about 20% of the time, but I have not kept track. That would be interesting to do... And also track how much time I spend working when I'm not interested.