As to prior art...any MOM (Message Oriented Middleware) has this defn of a bot at the core, as users request for data and a process/application looks up the data and passes it back.
Further, Reuter Monitor had been doing that since the dawn of time - also 1982? - It was written on PDP-8's when they were the latest thing. People used it to chat all right - at one stage 80% of the worlds Interbank FOREX was performed over it using split screen pages. The Post Office (of the UK) was LIVID when they found out! ;-) It was one of the forerunners of what the internet became. Information distribution in real time via static and refreshing pages, news, alerts, home pages, chat and 'chatrooms' (or was that conferencing?). It also was authenticated (ok, you hard a hardware auth) and permissions controlled access down to single user to page granularity. I cannot see how the patent would hold. Anyhow, the Australian Patent Office allowed someone to patent the wheel a year or so ago...I am not joking! Tim __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ jdev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.jabber.org/listinfo/jdev
