Thoughts 09 Oct 2008 07:44 am
Microsoft Patents Page-up/Page-down
US patent number 7,415,666 describes “a method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed”. —IBM keyboards, which were the standard for years, had this feature back when I was running an 8088 chip and a full meg of ram was to expensive for mere mortals even if their motherboard would support it.
Because there exists so much previous art their claim to be the inventors won’t stand up in court. But just in case you think this is a waste of time consider their obvious reasoning. With the size of Microsoft’s legal department(s) and their aggressive anti-competitor approach no one but the major competitors have deep enough pockets to stand against them.
M$ has something approaching 10,000 patents most of which are a pathetic as this one. But each of them gives M$ ammunition for a legal attack that can be used to bankrupt a smaller company.
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What? You really believe M$ invented something? —Fool, even their base os was purchased for about $60k. It was QDOS -Quick and Dirty Operating System. They just renamed it DOS and leased it to IBM.
When IBM first approach M$ about an operating system the company said they didn’t do operating systems, only ports of programming languages.
IBM then went to the inventor of CPM who immediately went off to play tennis or some such, leaving his wife to negotiate. She refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement so IBM went back to Dear ole uncle Bill and company, who by then had figured out an angle.
—And that boys and girls is how desktop computing was lost to the Dark Side.