On 12 Jan 00, at 15:48, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> ...in that case windowing is considered "prior art," and the patent is
> invalid on its face. Jud, assuming you have reasonable supporting
> documentation for your use of windowing prior to 1996, you should consider
> sending it to the U.S. patent and trademark office, http://www.uspto.gov
> (even if you have no desire to attempt to patent it - clearly, showing
> that you merely thought of it before 1996 in order to invalidate Joe
> Schmoe's patent is much easier than proving that you thought of it before
> anyone else did and seeking a patent yourself). Note that prior art is
> most easily established via publication, public use or sale - if you only
> wrote a windowing script for your own use, it may be more difficult to
> prove.
What about all the dialects of various languages which allow one to
declared windowed arrays? (e.g. Microsoft QBASIC released circa 1988
allows e.g. DIM PROFITS (1984 TO 2018))
Or, sliding variable-size windowing has been in the TCP definition
for at least twice as long as that.
I think the reason no-one bothered to patent or copyright the idea of
windowing is it is that it's so obvious ...
>
> >From a programming perspective, my own top "why 2K" question is this
> >this:
> even given that the person(s) who first used a mere 2 characters to store
> the year had good reason (e.g. severely limited computer memory) to do so,
> why didn't they use those 2 precious bytes as a 2-byte integer?
COBOL programmers probably declared the year variable as PIC(99) -
and a COBOL programmer has no direct means of knowing how that's
stored in memory. (Note that PIC 99 USAGE COMPUTATIONAL (binary)
would still require 7 bits whereas PIC 999 USAGE COMPUTATIONAL would
require 10 bits. PIC 9(4) USAGE COMPUTATIONAL is as near as you can
get to a 16-bit integer using COBOL but still only stores values 0000
- 9999. Anyway, back in the '60s, lots of systems had word lengths
based on multiples of 6 rather than of 8, so manipulating an explicit
16-bit integer would not neccessarily have been efficient!
Note that, on an 8 bit machine, COBOL compilers would group together
variables defined as PIC 99 and align them on byte boundaries, this
actually gives quite reasonable packing & makes arithmetic easy
provided you have BCD arithmetic instructions. In fact, this is why
modern processors retain BCD arithmetic - the instructions are hardly
ever used, except by programs written in COBOL!
Regards
Brian Beesley
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