decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
That could be a problem . . . . | 265 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
That could be a problem . . . .
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 12 2013 @ 01:06 PM EDT
The patent's priority date is estimated by Google to be Aug. 7, 1995.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

A small matter of historical accuracy
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 12 2013 @ 01:13 PM EDT
1. Edison did not invent the light bulb.

2. Edison did not claim that he had invented the light bulb.

3. Edison's patent was not for the "invention" of the light bulb.

Instead of any of the above, Edison's patent was for an *improvement* to the
light bulb, and it says so right in the patent application. What he had
succeeded in doing was making a light bulb which was sufficiently cheap to be
affordable, and sufficiently long lasting (he tested it up to 750 hours of use)
to be actually usable.

In recent years, it seems that we might need to have his standards of quality
brought back again. I have bought lots of light bulbs which went kapoof wnen
first screwed into the socket and turned on. I bet you have, too.

Fortunately, it is improbable that there are any patents on making light bulbs
which are not good for anything but getting them home from the store before they
burn out. Even though there are software patents which really do seem to be that
ridiculous.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

They're going back to 1998 to find prior art here...
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 12 2013 @ 01:28 PM EDT
Command-line history goes back to the 70s, at least. In the
GUI world, auto-complete suggestions in programs like Word
and Excel were well-established in the 1980s.

Oh, and your history of Edison is all wrong. Look up Joseph
Swan and William Sawyer. I'll give you a head start:
http://edison.rutgers.edu/NamesSearch/glocpage.php3?
gloc=W100DD

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

They're going back to 1998 to find prior art here...
Authored by: rcsteiner on Friday, April 12 2013 @ 04:43 PM EDT
Command history has a long and glorious history. I have a copy of the source
for CSHELL*CSHELL here, an approximately UNIX-like OS2200 command shell for
DEMAND users developed by a couple of guys in the Unisys EXEC group in Roseville
MN, and I think the latest version was released back in 1992.



---
-Rich Steiner >>>---> Mableton, GA USA
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

They're going back to 1998 to find prior art here...
Authored by: JamesK on Friday, April 12 2013 @ 04:45 PM EDT
Well, I was using "history" on a VAX 11/780 back in the '80s, IIRC.
How long has it been in Linux/Unix? It's even been in MS-DOS for many years.

---
The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

They're going back to 1998 to find prior art here...
Authored by: PJ on Friday, April 12 2013 @ 05:30 PM EDT
1998 is the year it was published, not the
year the work was done. I would assume
when the work was done and when the public
had knowledge of it will be coming up
in the deposition.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

He published a paper about it in 1994
Authored by: bugstomper on Friday, April 12 2013 @ 06:02 PM EDT
It's in Japanese, but the title and abstract are in English

Link to the Japanese PDF A Simple Approach to Adaptive Text Editors by Toshiyuki Masui from Shoichi Takeuchi (Eds.), Interactive Systems:... Japan Society for Software Science and Technology WISS'94, 145-154 modern science company PP, 1994

The Abstract:

Summary.
We propose a simple adaptive predictive interface for text editing tasks. A text editor can predict the next user input from various information available, such as the user's repetitive operations, a dictionary of frequently- used wors, preveously-input text strings, etc. Using a text editor with such a predictive feature, a user can ask the system to predict his next operation and select the appropriate one from the candidates shown by the system. If the system can also keep track of the user's selections and know the user's preferences, it can gradually adapt itself to the user and show more appropriate candidates next time. We implemented five prediction schemes on GNU Emacs, and also implemented one simple adaptation scheme for ordering the prediction schemes. Empirical results show that adaptive predictive interface shows higher usability than non-adaptive interface.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

They're going back to 1998 to find prior art here...
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 15 2013 @ 07:29 AM EDT
Haven't read the patent, but things that come to my mind regarding histories and
selecting from previously entered data:

I was using command line history back in 1986/7 using the c-chell (csh) on Unix
(specifically BSD Suns) [deliberately used csh as sh (bash) did not have command
history, nor proper job control - they seem to have arrived with bash] and an
ADDS Mentor system running Pick - this latter having a command to edit the list
of stored history.

However, neither of these systems proffered suggestions as I was typing [don't
know if this is pertinent]. csh did allow commands to be selected by starting
with specified characters (eg ``!v'' would pick up the most recent command
starting with a v) or containing selected characters (eg ``!?ed'' would find the
most recent command in which the characters "ed" appeared) - there may
be more csh features regarding history and repeating, but those were the two I
most often used.

I wrote a system with an entry history system in 1988-90

A honeywell DPS 6 running Pick (I used from 1991-1994) had a command history

I also wrote a system using MS Access and its COMBO boxes (using a 1994 book as
a reference) to select from a list and that I do remember used to proffer
suggestions from the list as entries were typed - the lists themselves were
filled from previously entered data.

The question is how appropriate are these to the patent? Does the patent
actually have a novel way of doing the actual history or is it just trying to
patent the idea (by being as broad as possible to catch ways of which the
inventors had not thought) and has caught up much prior art (destroying any
patent protection the inventors may have had for an actual novel invention)?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )