🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9105162120.AA14443@mole.gnu.ai.mit.edu> rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Richard Stallman) writes:
>I traced down the source of the story of a patent on include files.
>It turns out that the patent belongs to IBM, but include files are not
>what it covers.  (At least, I don't think it would cover them.)
>
>The patent is titled "Merging of Documents".  It covers displaying
>part of one document within the display of another, in response to a
>kind of cross-reference.  This is, of course, a basic idea of
>hypertext.  So many hypertext systems would infringe this patent.
>
>This patent might be invalid because of Ted Nelson's book on
>hypertext.  However, it may cost a lot of money to prove this.
>
>The patent number is 4,674,040.  It was issued in 1987.

I suspect that Doug Englebart's work kills it rather thoroughly unless
it is predicated on the specific form of display. Doug demonstrated NLS
in 1968 at the San Francisco FJCC (or was it the SJCC?). NLS amounted
to a windowing hypertext system (including embedded references to other
documents) and generated all kinds of thinking in this area. The Xerox
PARC people are fairly explicit in acknowledging their debt in this
area with respect to Star.

NLS or, at least its successor, Augment, allowed you to jump to a
referenced document, jump back, display both the current one and the
other one (in different windows) and most if not all of the usual
hypertext paradigms. I'm no attorney, but I suspect that where this
patent might hold up is in the means of display. This would be typical
of other patents I have seen, they don't cover the basic concept but
the specific implementation of it. This last is, of course, idle
speculation on my part as I haven't read the patent (and may not be
competent to interpret it anyway).

NLS, by the way, is the system for which the mouse was invented (Doug
used to have the patent on his wall, a patent in the public domain as
NLS was funded by the government).

Terry