AW: Ray Ozzie claims prior art in Lotus Notes

> Lets change the subject for a second:
>
> How many people here ever used a modem to dial into a BBS and communicate
> with the sysop and here local community of users, either in chat, mail or
> just to download files?
>
> However, for the majority, their first adventure into the "telecomputing"
> market was when the Internet appeared and ISPs became to offer
> Internet PPP accounts.

I don't even know how those BB Systems you speak of work. But my first
expericence with telecomputing was the German BTX-System (which might be the
same thing), which was introduced by the Deutsche Post in Germany when I was
6 years old (that is, 1977). A BTX decoder used a Television set as a
display, was connected to the telephone line, you dialed an number on your
phone and a page showed up on yout TV set, including fancy graphics and
everything (as long as you idea of fancy graphics included brick-sized
pixels).
I guess technically this is not prior art to the Eolas Patent, but within
the limitations of the time it did everything an Internet Browser does
today. It was later (late 80s) changed into a web-based service (which was
shut down only recently) because many people used BTX for "online banking"
(is that a proper phrase? I mean remote transactions on their bank account).
So the Internet really was something obvious - to me, it was just something
like an improved BTX-System, something I had seen  frequently (although
rarely used) even when I was a child. I was not terribly surprised when
Internet Browsers displayed moving pictures and stuff, because I had always
wondered why BTX didn't do that. So plug-ins where a bit like Henry Ford
saying "Let's add some wheels to this car" - it sure works better that way,
but then you wouldn't be too impressed by this invention.

Of course, a Patent is (or rather should be) more about technical
implementation and not about how a thing looks to the "average user", so I'm
not sure what I'm trying to prove (except that many a user wouldn't
understand what the excitement is all about).

-- eike
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Received on Monday, 15 September 2003 07:45:14 UTC