Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Quarterdeck's "patent"
Keywords: Quarterdeck, software patent, DESQview
Message-ID: <3190@looking.UUCP>
Date: 4 May 89 03:27:53 GMT
References: <1866@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 18

Quarterdeck's "patent" is fortunately, as far as I could read, not
on the general idea of multiasking windowing, but on the way they
do it for badly behaved DOS programs.

What they do is let the dos program write into where the screen memory
is, and they have service routines look there and copy the new output
to their windows.

Now it strikes me that this is a very silly thing to have a patent
granted on.  While many ideas are "obvious" after the fact, this is a
pretty clear case of something that was obvious, just a pain to do, before
anybody ever did it.

I am all for patent law, actually, but I think that cases like this do
more harm to patent law than good, as they make a lot of people get
up and use it as evidence of why patents are bad.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473