🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <79@mtxinu.UUCP> ed@mtxinu.UUCP (Ed Gould) writes:
>>> I hate to tell you folks, but Andy Bechtolsheim here at Sun has a patent 
>>> (applied for and granted) on using the untranslated addresses as the 
>>> RAS addresses and doing the MMU address translation before the column 
>>> addresses are needed for CAS.
>>
>>How the hell can the patent office grant patents like this?  It's sort
>>of like patenting the idea of grounding DTACK on a 68000 or putting
>>chocolate ice cream in root beer; the idea is too obvious.  To coin a
>>phrase, it's patently ridiculous.
>
>If it's so obvious, why didn't anyone think of it before Andy did?

I did; it's the obvious way of building an MMU that doesn't introduce extra
wait states, and applies to the 68K family because the other common
16/32 bit CPUs don't require custom MMUs.

>Is the Set-UID bit (also patented) any less obvious?  Not to me,
>now that I've seen them both.  But I never thought of them; neither
>did anyone else, evidently, before their respective inventors.

Like the guy who patented the xor cursor, or Apple's pull-down menu
patent, I'll believe it when it holds up in court.

Jan Gray   Northern Software and University of Waterloo   885-5921