Originally Posted by spiel2001
Truer words never spoken.
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Seeing as I mentioned in my last post about programming in the good old early days, that laughably could have been called 'desktop' computing, I thought I'd mention this:
Today I was catching up on the last several weeks of articles/comments on the blog TechDirt (you should check it out), some of which were about software patents. The articles about software patents caused me to wonder how any reasonably intelligent person, especially anybody with a math background, could possibly decide that software algorithms should ever be allowed to be patented in the first place! I read the final application paperwork on several patents created in the last 25 or so years, and especially notable were several that were part of the Apple/Samsung lawsuit. They are so broadly written as to be laughable, so much so that they should have been declared invalid and thrown out by the court before it ever got to a jury. My God, several of them, by my own personal knowledge, had multiple instances of prior art going back to the late 60's/early 70's, created independently by multiple programmers! Hell, for anybody with a Math background (especially Boolean logic) they were blindingly obvious, the only limiting factor as to use of the code being whether or not you had enough ram to include it.
As an aside, for you youngsters out there, back in those days having 8k or, if you were really lucky, 16k of ram was considered Nirvana!!!
How in the world did some schmuck ever decide software patents were a good idea or, even worse, necessary!!!!