On Mon, 7 Dec 1998, Christopher Hinds wrote:
> So What? Ever heard of a spreadsheet product called Visicalc. Visicalc
> ran
> on CPM OS( Late 70s early 80s). The company( the name excapes me ) that
> developed Visicalc held the patent on the spreadsheet type GUI's also.
> Then along came Lotus 1.2.3 , MuliPlan , and even MS Excel.
> I have not seen any of the products removed from the market by patent
> infringement violations.
Vision Software Inc I think. Was bought by Lotus while Lotus was suing
Borland and others re L&F of 123.
>
> Ernst de Haan wrote:
>
> > Found a link to this article on JavaLobby:
> >
> > http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit19981203.html
> >
> > Could turn out bad. Very bad.
For those who've not seen it, this seems to be most relevant.
On November 17th, little Eolas came into effective control of
U.S. patent number 5,838,906 for an invention described as "a
distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking
external application providing interaction and display of
embedded objects within a hypermedia document." Say that fast
three times. The patent is held by The University of California in
the name of inventors Michael Doyle, David Martin and Cheong
Ang. Doyle is the CEO of Eolas, which is the exclusive licensee of
the patent.
I've been using OS/2 for some years, since before the WWW existed. OS/2
manuals are distributed as hypertext documents. One of the capabilities of
the viewer is the ability to launch external programs which could be the
program being described, or perhaps an audio supplement or other special
viewer.
As others have remarked, the idea of executable tokenised code in one form
or another is not new. I used Software AG's Natural on IBM-compatible mainframes in
the early 80s and Natural has a compilation phase which creates tokenised
object code.
Point & shoot was in use to some extent then too: no mice, but we had light
pens to click on onscreen selectable fields not very different from the
hypertext links we use now.
ISPF was around in te late 80s too, and it did do hypertext and run
supplementary application code that could be scripted (MVS command
procedures and the like) or coded in compiled languages such as PL/1, COBOL
and assembler.
So the general idea is not new, but HTML is no more than an implementaion
of the ideas embodied in ISPF dialogues. Syntactically, they're about as
similar as C and COBOL.
Arguably the client-server notion's covered with Natural, an early
fourth-generation programming language. It provides a simplified
programming environment for access to databases which need not be on the
same computer. Natural runs under the control of a TP monitor (equates
somewhat with web browser). Screen layout is ordinarily done from Natural
as one can with Java. If anyone ever bothered to run a Natural program in
ISPF (entirely possible in the late 80s) then they've done pretty much
everything mentioned in Cringle's article.
--
Cheers
John Summerfield
http://os2.ami.com.au/os2/ for OS/2 support.
Configuration, networking, combined IBM ftpsites index.
