Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!husc6!ddl
From: ddl@husc6.harvard.edu (Dan Lanciani)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Quarterdeck's "patent"
Keywords: Quarterdeck, software patent, DESQview
Message-ID: <1756@husc6.harvard.edu>
Date: 4 May 89 23:24:11 GMT
References: <1866@blake.acs.washington.edu> <3190@looking.UUCP>
Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge MA
Lines: 24

In article <3190@looking.UUCP>, brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:
| 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.

	If the patent really is on this general concept (letting the program
write where it wants and copying the data) I'm pretty sure it has been
done before.  ZPC (a PC emulator for the Z100) does this to run badly
behaved DOS programs on a Z100 (which has a different format for, and,
fortunately, a different location of, screen memory).  Several CGA-on-HGC
emulation programs do this also.  Of course, these aren't windowing
programs...

				Dan Lanciani
				ddl@harvard.*