I'd suggest some combination of googling for "Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Lab" and "alpha blending" as a method for finding hits from SAIL.
One of the things you'd find is a cached reference telling us The
Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although the SAIL
computer continued as a Computer Science Department resource until
1991.
Why the early dates are so important has to do with priority
dates, the original patent the reissue RE41,922 is based on
is a submarine patent dating back to 1993.
This application is a
broadening reissue of U.S. Pat. No. 6,072,489, issued on Jun. 6, 2000. U.S. Pat.
No. 6,072,489 is a continuation-in-part of patent application Ser. No.
08/060,572, filed May 10, 1993 under the title “Method and Apparatus for
Displaying an Overlay Image,” now U.S. Pat. No. 5,638,501 on behalf of Gough et
al. and assigned to the same assignee as herein, the disclosure of which is
hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Priority rights and
claims of benefit based upon this earlier-filed patent application are claimed.
More than one reissue application has been filed for the reissue of U.S. Pat.
No. 6,072,489. The reissue applications are application Ser. Nos. 10/163,748
(the present application), and 12/437,500 a continuation reissue of U.S. Pat.
No. 6,072,489.
I seem to recall Silicon Graphics had the
capability of doing alpha compositing on any 'window' in 1989 done in hardware
with dedicated image bitplanes, conspicuously missing from the patent's Other
Publications non-patent prior art. Previously the frame rate was limited by
using main memory for an alpha buffer. I did some engineering support trips to
JPL where they were experimenting with telefactoring, using an SGI graphics
workstation to predict movements of robots at interplanetary distances to
overcome round trip delay. Visual feedback in lieu of haptics. This would have
been 1987 using GL2, and you'd expect the methods used to read directly Apple's
patent.
I also recall another graphics workstation company Stardent/Kubota
Pacific Computers offering hardware alpha blending in 1991.
In
Analysis of PEX 5.1 and OpenGL 1.0 Allen Akin, August 3, 1992 we learn that
OpenGL 1.0 supports blending, there should be references back to 1988.
I'd
look at Computer Graphics - Principles and Practice (Second Edition). J.D.Foley,
A.Van-Dam, S.K.Feiner and J.F.Hughes, Addison-Wesley, 1990 under 'Compositing'.
In general the era is characterized by lack of ready visibility on the Internet,
papers behind paywalls as a rule.
You could also look at Wikipedia's entry Alpha compositing for
some basic background and early non patent prior art references.
The
ITC's preliminary finding (PDF
144KB) indicates Samsung infringes claims 29,30 and 33-35 of the reissued
patent. As a practitioner of the art I have a hard time imagining claim 29 is
non-obvious with respect to prior art even with respect to patent
5,638,501.
Using the USPTO's Patent Application Information Retrieval public
portal with the Application number 90/012,744 (sans comma) will get you the
reexamination request for patent RE41,922. You can find reexamination requests
under continuity data listed against a patent looked up in PAIR, as PJ so ably
reminded me recently. You could also wonder why "in a handheld device" is a
permissible field of use restriction in the patent claims.
The
reexamination request confines itself to patent prior art, appears thorough in
claims construction (dissection) and is comprised of 133 pages.
As a person
having ordinary skill in the art it might be essential to understand claim
limitations of the patent to distinguish the narrowed grounds claimed over prior
art.
At least some of the claims read as those § 112 (f) 'Element in
Claim for a Combination' claims. It also questions re-issued claim validity.
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