🚀 go-pugleaf

For those interested in wild patent claims, U. S. Patent No. 3,405,457
is worth looking at.  This is the PLATO Patent, owned by the University
of Illinois.  It's been 15 years since I read it, but I distinctly
remember that one of its claims covered the use of a single computer to
serve the independent needs of multiple interactive users.  That is,
it covered all timesharing systems.

The Patent Office should never have granted this claim, and fortunately,
the University of Illinois never tried to enforce the claim during the
life of the patent.  The patent was, for many years, licenced to CDC,
and I've collected a modest sum of money under that licence agreement
for my small part in developing PLATO "courseware" and bitmapped
character sets.
					Doug Jones
					jones@cs.uiowa.edu