🚀 go-pugleaf

>> 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?
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.

The person who first put chocolate ice cream into root beer probably
didn't realize what they'd done.  They should have patented it, too!
(Unless, of course, someone had already done the same thing with
vanilla ice cream.  Then *they* should have pattented it.)

The real question, to me, is (since the original poster suggested that
Sun's competitors would have to start paying for this idea) Who really
owns the patent?  The idea was developed while Andy was at Stanford,
possibly (I have no idea, one way or the other) with public money.
If it was developed with Federal money, then policy says that there
will be no fees for use of the patent.  If Sun owns it, then there
probably will be fees.

-- 
Ed Gould                    mt Xinu, 2560 Ninth St., Berkeley, CA  94710  USA
{ucbvax,decvax}!mtxinu!ed   +1 415 644 0146

"A man of quality is not threatened by a woman of equality."