Dé Céad, 2004-01-14 ag 18:44, scríobh Ciaran O'Riordan:
Hi all,
I'm still writing that patents letter, although I've overcommitted myself a bit recently so work is slow. I have a draft, but it gets rewritten every time I look at it, so it's not yet at a stage where it would be useful to post it and ask for comments.
A request: Can people find a few great technologies that *aren't* patented?
The spreadsheet, as originally implemented in Visicalc (I think), was not patented. This was the "killer app" that started personal computing. It led to Lotus 123 (which increased adoption of IBM PCs) and of course Microsoft Excel, which seems to be a de facto standard for tabular data in the business world. The spreadsheet patent would only have expired around 2000.
This is speculation on my part, but had the spreadsheet been patented, there's a good chance that lots of other business/PC software such as word processors would have been patented too.
David