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Prior Art to Squash Database Patent? 142

Posted by Cliff from the did-the-USPTO-strike-out-again dept.
Marianne Winslett asks: "I'm looking for prior art to help squash a US patent that I think should never have been granted. In particular, I am looking for applications with a relational database back end, X-windows user interface, and application code somewhere in between. Think of it as an example of a 3-tier architecture, with a very thin client and a remote relational database back end. The application must have been released by the end of 1991." The patent in question was not revealed by the submittor on advice from legal counsel. Anyone know of any application that might satisfy these requirements?

"For any such application, I need to know

  1. Its name,
  2. Where or by whom it was created,
  3. A brief description of its functionality,
  4. Its release date in the US (pre-1992),
  5. Ideally a pointer to one or more pieces of evidence documenting the three previous points, such as a manual, release notes, internal or external mail, press releases, etc. (either electronic or on paper), and
  6. Contact information for a person or persons who would be willing to swear under oath that the software had been released by the given date and that the evidence documenting its existence (if any) is what it appears to be.

The lawyers have asked me not to say which patent this lawsuit is about, but by the nature of the prior art that I'm looking for you can tell that it affects just about everyone and really should not have been granted. I figure that there must have been hundreds of such systems out there in 1991; because time is very short, I hope that the community can help me find them.

Marianne Winslett
Professor, Computer Science, University of Illinois at U-C
http://drl.cs.uiuc.edu"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Prior Art to Squash Database Patent? More

Prior Art to Squash Database Patent?

Comments Filter:

  • Compuserve (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    While not X-Windows, the Compuserve Information Manager software (DosCIM, WinCIM, and MacCIM) follow this model.

    Of particular interest would be the "forms" API (cannot remember the real name) that was used to dynamically create a search interface for the magazine databases, stock quotes, weather and other areas of the service [They even put together a rudamentary Web Browser using this technology in 1994-1995].

    With this API, Compuserve could define basic query and results display interfaces on the server and any improvements would immediately be available when interpreted by the client software.

    Almost the entire back end of the service was based on relational database technology.

    I was only there 1993-1996, but I believe the dos and mac versions date from the mid to late 1980s.

  • Apple front-end software (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Back in the late 1980s, Apple had a development tool that let developers easily put GUI front-ends on existing text-mode programs. It provided a scripting language for "scraping" the contents of a terminal screen to the GUI, and converting keyboard and mouse events into whatever keystrokes the text-mode program required.

    Sorry I can't recall the name of the program, but if anyone used it to talk to an existing program that used a RDBMS, it would meet your requirements.

    Hope this helps!

  • some nefarious motives for you (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Any prior art you cite as part of a patent application is automatically unavailable as a challenge. The presumption is that if it was cited and the patent office knew about it, it couldn't invalidate the patent.

    That's why applicants have a strong incentive to perform prior art searches and cite prior art.

  • Published paper (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've found one paper that might fit the description:
    A visual interface for a database with version management
    by Jay W. Davison and Stanley B. Zdonik
    It was published in ACM Transactions on Information Systems Volume 4, Issue 3 (1986). Pages 226-256

  • CSU VIKING System may comprise prior art (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm sorry I don't have more information on this, however, Cleveland State University's VIKING student information system had a Cullinet IDMS/R relational database backend running on IBM mainframes prior to 1991. The university was also running Unix extensively, and open VMS on VAX computers that I believe could access the VIKING system. The graphical frontend/middleware? may have been running on Unix. I know they were using Cullinet's Goldengate and Infogate software which was DOS based. I don't know if there was a Unix version. The computer science department could certainly provide detailed information.
    The CSU homepage is www.csuohio.edu.

  • More Prior art by SAIC (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    SAIC also bought a company that made a real time security system for large facilities like airports, corporate headquarters. Its been in use at airports at Oahu, San Diego, Memphis, and Brussels. The product was called AMACS amount other names. It had a X-window user interface running on a Unix PC connected to a Sybase RDB running on a fault tolerant Stratus system over an ethernet based network. I worked on it in 1994, and it was atleast 2 years old then, and I am over 50% sure it was older than than 1992.

    Actually, I'd bet there are alot of Military systems SAIC built for the US that fit this specification. Whether they can talk about them, I don't know.

    Note about SAIC. It might be hard to find someone still there that will be able to help. SAIC is a pretty fragmented company.

  • Sorry, just 1992 (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Open Environment Corporation's Open Distributed Environment (a simpler version of OSF DCE) could operate in the 3-tier environment you described. However, the company was acquired by Borland, which is now Inprise.

    Good luck.

  • GeoVision (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Back in late 80's (86-) I worked for a Canadian company called GeoVision (a spin-off of SystemHouse aka SHL now belongs to MCI) that made an X-based GIS (Geographical Information System). We used X-Windows 10 (and later 11) on the front-end running on micro-vaxes and later Sun 2/xxx, and a mixture of flat-file and Oracle databases on the back-end running on Vaxes, Unish*ts and later Suns. It was basically a giant client-server system, with multiple X-based processes on the front-end.

    Anyway, they sold the software to various clients in the States (e.g. Southwestern Bell) and all over the world. They went bankrupt around the end of 80s and the software got assimilated back into SHL, so there are no obvious pointers to them on the web, but with a little research you might be able to dig up something. They were based in Ottawa.

    Hope this helps, and good luck.

  • Teamwork might fit the bill (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Teamwork is a Structured Analysis/Design (or, more generally, a CASE) tool released by Cadre Technologies many many years ago. I'm not sure exactly when, though this link [interex.org] is from a 1987 conference and mentions Cadre and Teamwork.

    I'm not certain what it was like back then, but the version that I worked with in the mid 90's had an Xwindows front end, which communicated with a mid-tier broker, which in turn stored its information in a database on the main server. Which sounds like exactly what you're asking about.

    Cadre eventually merged with Bachman to become Cayenne Software, which was bought by Sterling Software [sterling.com], which itself was recently bought by Computer Associates. I'm willing to bet that there's at least someone still around there who would know for sure.

  • Re:GeoVision (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I wondered if I'd see a post about VISION* - I worked at GeoVision way back when as well.

    I'm not sure if it's quite what's being looked for, but it does date from the 1980's and back then, had users world wide. The product (or the concept anyway - there can't be much of the original code left) is still alive and well.

    The ex-GVC unit was most recently aquired by Autodesk. See

    http://www.autodesk.com/prods/vision /index.htm [autodesk.com]

    for more details.

    As far as I know there are still a few of the original developers involved with the code...

    Good Luck!

  • Re:If you need to know more (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28, 2000 @04:55PM (#820903)
    You're really asking a lot without giving a lot.

    You're asking us to get involved in a legal "battle" without giving us any details whatsoever. How smart of us would it be if we got involved without a shred of information from you? We have no idea who you are, or who you're up against.

    What if by giving you the name of a small company, you used that company as prior art, but then it ruined a multi-million dollar relationship that company had with one of its biggest customers? You have to remember that people with kids to feed *work* for that small company. For you, it is an (presumably) intellectual and moral battle. For others, it could be their only source of business.

    Uh-uh, no way. You're asking us to submit information without any quid-pro-quo whatsoever. I think *you* should go ask your lawyers and find out conclusively what you can legally disclose. Why should I waste my time talking to lawyers when you should get this information and post it. Full disclosure is only fair.

    You should atleast disclose:
    1) Who you are dealing against. This is fair, since business relationships can be affected.

    2) What your plans are. How do we know you're not going to turn around and create a patent of your own? How do we know you're actually an open-source advocate, or if you're just exploiting the resources of /. to further your own economic goals? What if you're trying to steal the design created by some non-profit organization (for example)? We have no incentive to help you with some information.

    3) What work it will create for the company that actually had the prior art. What if you create a huge workload for a small company that frankly can't afford to spend on someone else's problem? You should explain what the total work would be required. Would we be subpoenaed? Would we need to write a 10 page essay? If it requires more than sending an e-mail to some judge, why should we waste our valuable time helping you?

    I think you should answer these questions fully and truthfully before you can expect real help.

  • It seems to me that you'd want to start from the RDBMS itself -- what was available in that timeframe, and who was using it? I kinda remember Unify, Oracle and Ingres... what others were there?

    So troll around in user groups and mailing lists and such for these products, and see if you can find people who were using those back then and did they ever have an X-based application for it.

    One possible thing to do is to search through some antique collections of open-source software. For example, I have Walnut Creek's three volumes of Usenet source newsgroup archives (comp.sources.unix, comp.sources.x, etc). I took a quick look through the 1985-1990 and 1991-1992 volumes, and nothing jumped out at me. Still, you might be able to use these somewhat indirectly -- for example, by recursively grepping through the comp.sources.x stuff, I noted that a fellow by the name of Gibson, working at Unify, made some contributions to olvwm3 in the early 1990s. If you can track him down, he might remember if they ever did any X-based apps or if they just used X for developing non-X code like everyone else.

    I will say, though, digging through those CDs was quite a trip down memory lane.

  • When filing a patent, there's a presumption that you've been working on the invention for a year before you get around to the paperwork. Therefore prior art has to be at least a year old at the time the patent was filed. Chances are the patent in question was filed in 1992 or 1993.

    ----
  • And exactly how would you profit from doing this?
  • And that system is probably the current patent holder to boot... ;]
  • http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/proceedings/mod/ 93597/p387-cha/

    This URL points to an abstract of a system that seems to assume some of the prior art that you are asking for. However it's been done on an old Xerox LISP machine, not on a UNIX box using the X window system.

    However the abstract does say that the database is running on a sun server with a relational database, and the article is from 1990.

    I don't have an ACM account with which to access the complete article, and I'm not going to pay for the download. Perhaps your library has this on the shelf?

    -Peter
  • I've seen some clerks at a bank use a CDE interface to what I assume to be a backend script/logic thingy to what I assume gets stored in a RDBMS.

    While I'm not sure if CDE has existed for this long, bank applications might be a good place to look.

    Also, If you consider the man database to be relational (it DOES tell you to see other man pages :). xman is also copyright 1988 by MIT, or at least that's the earliest implementation that I can find.

  • Released December 1991
    http://www.ugsolutions.com/products/iman/about_i man/historytext.shtml

    However, it might not count - it had an X (Motif) UI, and a relational database underneath, but it's not clear how separated your layers/tiers have to be. Does the UI/client have to be a separate process from the application code, or is being on X sufficient for that (i.e. is the X server itself your "very thin client")?

  • SAS (Score:1)

    by Plastik ( 7128 )
    Where I work, we use the SAS system from the SAS Institute.

    http://www.sas.com
    http://www.sas.com/products/af/index.html

    The SAS system provides a relational database, and the SAS/AF portion of the
    product lets you code "user-friendly interactive windowing applications". I
    don't know too much about the full capabilities of it, but in our case these
    applications have an X interface. The applications are written in the SAS
    programming language. The SAS Institute has been around since the '70s, and I
    believe these products have been around since well before 1991.

    So there's the X front end, some SAS code in the middle, and the SAS database
    on the back end, and it's pre-1991.
  • Clearly, the implication is that this patent affects a lot of people, and the poster's research will certainly benefit the entire industry. I'm sure a good number of readers have written applications fitting this discription, and could be charged royalty fees if the patent is not defeated.
  • If its a far reaching - you're all damned - kinda patent, why not broadcast it to the world so it can be picked to pieces?

    Sounds more like you're getting Slashdot to provide you with, or prove the absense of, prior art to:

    a) Fight a lawsuit brought about by you over a patent you own

    or

    b) Check for prior art the easy way before filing for a patent of your own.... perhaps saving a bit of your own time and money?

    If not, why would you not provide the patent number so that everyone else can join the call to arms? (ie. safety in numbers??)

    Sorry to be cynical, but what legal reason could there be to prevent you from stating the number?

    M@T

  • i have several (Score:5)

    by Blue Lang ( 13117 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @04:58PM (#820914) Homepage
    1) A company called QSP has had a 3 tier finacial suite around for the last 15 or 20 years. I dunno about the x-windows interface, tho.

    character gui -> mainframe broker -> database.

    2) XDM. That's right, the X display manager. Login Screen -> PAM -> /etc/passwd

    3) IBM's callup application. It's a program to look up info on IBM employees, and it has every interface known to man. I'm willing to be that some Unix dork back in the day wrote an X front end to it. It's prolly even more than 3 tiers.

    as an aside, who cares why she wants the patent shut down? it's a software patent on obvious technology, and it can foad.

    good luck,
    blue
  • no... some are actually quite ingeniuous. Problem is is that the patent office seams to dole out patents to anyone who takes the time and spend the money for a patent application, which makes whole system look bad. But it's not. True inventiveness should be protected as patents were designed to do. It's just that the mechanism behind them is becoming more and more flawed as time goes on.

    Keep the patents, overhaul the system that awards them, i say.
  • But /. wasn't around prior to 1992, and hence doesn't serve as prior art, as the professor is looking for...

    And the point still stands, that just because this person may be the enemy of your enemy doesn't neccessarily mean htat she's your friend, right? I think it's right in asking that if she's going to ask /.'s aid, she should be more forthcoming about her intentions, and even disclose the details of the patent she wants to debunk. Of course, we don't know her situation, but if she'd masqueraded behind a freebie webmail address in the Czech Republic, she wouldn't have needed to worry about such things....
  • Even earlier than that, AOL was founded in 1985. I don't know when they had their first Mac client, but I'm fairly certain that it was before 1992. And since they've been driven by databases of one sort or another for quite some time, they could surely stand to be prior art, would you think? GUI application causes client computer to dial up to server to request information from it. Sounds about right... Then again any BBS system would do, but AOL seems most fitting to use as "prior art"...

  • My last job I worked on an app like that (Score:3)

    by josepha48 ( 13953 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @03:00PM (#820918) Journal
    It had a relation database. DB2 Oracle, and I think maybe sybase. I know that it had db2 at least. It had a front end.
    name: Advantage Financial (I think)
    company: not sure if I CAN say
    release date: the initial non x version was pre 92, and it micht have been pre 90. They moved to neuron data to build a UI for it. neuron data is(was) a C API that if you program to it you can compile on Mac, X or Windows.

    I am not sure how much is intellectual property here though.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    I don't want a lot, I just want it all ;-)
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • Perhaps that might work, but I'd be pissed if someone actually was able to make a business out of this, since it would mean that the patent office is not doing their job in the first place.

    (Not that there's any doubt in my mind as it is you understand.. just don't rub it in, ok?)
  • Yes, but the X-Windows may be important because perhaps the patent calls for a _graphical_ client.
  • You need to read the shit on this one, as if you had looked at the patents you would see that the applicant on all of them actually is

    International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY
  • Hi there, whichever ex-GeoVisioner you are :-)

    I posted a lot more about the product before I saw your posting. FYI, VISION* is know owned and sold by Autodesk (makers of AutoCAD, etc.), but they're still only targeting the big cu$tomers.

    (The flat files for spatial data were dropped with VISION* 2.0, where we went all-relational. I don't know who came up with the technology first, but Oracle's spatial-data extensions are very similar to what we (well, Orest, John, etc.) implemented).
  • While the source code to the VISION* (nee AMS/GIS) product (see this post [slashdot.org]) was hardly open, it was provided in escrow to various customers. But more to the point, a number of our developers (and marketeers, of course) presented papers on the overall design at various technical (mostly GIS and AM/FM related) conferences. The proceedings of those would surely qualify as publicly publishing them.

    I don't know how early this goes back. I know we made a big song and dance of going "all relational" (including the spatial data in the RDB) because we were perhaps the first company to do this and the buzz was that "it couldn't be done" (too much of a performance hit). But I'm sure that other papers and sales literature hit on the general design (RDBappX-windows) before we went "AR". (I don't recall exact dates on the latter, I'd have to dig out old calendars for things like design meetings, etc.)

  • Is 1987 early enough? (Score:3)

    by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2000 @08:01AM (#820924) Homepage
    Actually the software goes back before then, but 1987 is when I joined the company (since defunct, the technology has passed on through several hands, more below.)

    The product (then) had two versions (some overlapping code), AMS (Advanced Mapping System) and GIS (Geographic Information System), the company was GeoVision Systems Ltd (in the US, parent corp was GeoVision Corporation in Canada), spun off from SystemHouse Graphics. Later the products were slightly rearchitected and made more flexible, and renamed to "VISION*" under which name it's still sold.

    The core technology comprised a relational database -- primarily Oracle (Oracle 6, back then, Oracle 8 now), but we briefly flirted with Ingres and one other. The display technology was X Windows, X 10 back then, migrating to X 11 sometime around 1989 or 1990. The application code inbetween included various components such as a database-interface layer (which also added the spatial component), various form managers, display list managers, graphic editors, and a scripting language (we called it a "macro language" - GML, GeoVision Macro Language - but it wasn't really) to customize it and tie all the pieces together.

    Pretty neat actually, and with potential beyond the cartographic/GIS/etc domain (I once prototyped a CASE tool based on it in about a day). (In fact, so neat I'm working on an open source reimplementation of it -- see www.cavor.org [cavor.org] -- but there's a lot to go yet).

    As far as documenting it goes -- there ought to be some documents, old manuals, etc around although I don't have any. We had a number of large companies, municipal governments, and other government organizations as customers.

    The original company, GeoVision (not to be confused with another GIS company of the same name) went bankrupt back in 1993. The VISION* technology was bought by SystemHouse Ltd, (and most of the customers had source in escrow), traded hands a few times as companies were bought and sold, and is now owned by Autodesk who still markets the software [autodesk.com].

    Depending on the details of this patent, it could well threaten Autodesk's marketing of VISION*, so assuming they acquired whatever historical documents were around, they might be the people to talk to.
  • This is kinda cool, and I'm sure we'll all be better off in the long run if we help out, but posting this stuff is a bad precedent. Do we want a flood of similar stories?

    Ask /. is for discussion on technology that can help alot of people, or for sharing neat little hacks that can help a few people people, but not for legal research help for one person.

    In my unhumble opinion, anyway.

  • The NeXT, which originally came out in the 80s, had a nice database kit (DBKit) that could be used to write apps for relational databases. So any NeXT station running such an app remotely could be of note for this search. (Although, alas, that app might not be X-based...this was the NeXT). The announcement of an Ingres tool for the NeXT appears here [web.cern.ch].

    If this doesn't fit the bill, I really think the possibility of an Ingres-related application fitting your requirements is pretty high. Ingres was widely available in the academic/university community, supported remote connections from Unix, and almost certainly sported at least one X-based app.


  • Patent lawyers aren't really the people to find prior art on technical computer concepts... Let's just say, maybe this person is trying to determine if this is even an issue before getting lawyers too involved...
  • I'd find it hard to believe that with the CORBA specification being first agreed upon in 1991 that there wasn't some application built with it in a method similar to the one being discussed above. Relevant link: CORBA history [omg.org]
  • Windows4GL? That's what's on my CV...

  • tons of this kind of stuff (Score:3)

    by tater ( 23377 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @05:36PM (#820930) Homepage
    I worked for Ingres in the 80s and early 90s, and we sold software that let customers develop their own applications exactly like this - X-based frontend, going through a template-language-interpreting middleware bit to an Ingres DBMS backend. I can't remember the name because it was something horrible like VisualIngres, but I do remember seeing a customer demo a StarWars-related app he had built (SDI not the movie), so it must have been around the time you're asking about or earlier.
  • Sorry, it was the dead tree edition, which is now decaying very slowly in a landfill

    Huh... Don't you have/use paper recycling?

  • Informix had a product out about 1990 called Wingz. It was a Spreadsheet application but also had a procedural scpripting language called Hyperscript. It ran on Sun (OpenLook?, Motif?) Windows and Macintosh. Iinformix also had a product called Datalink that allowed querying against an Informix Database similiar to how ODBC now works. The three products combined were used by many comapnies as a client/server development system.
  • When did Sun start using calendar manager under X?

    Calendar manager is an application that talks to
    centralized calendar files using RPC. The client
    application is an X application. It connects to
    a database on a server system using RPC (rpc.cmsd).
    The database keeps track of the user's calendar
    appointments. You can check other people's
    calendars (the stuff they let you see)

    I think this has been around for quite a while,
    but I'm not sure the date. Does anyone know?
    I know it ran on SunOs 4.x with openwindows
    and later solaris.
  • I don't think that the patent is specific to a Unix based rdbms, so you might want to include DEC's rdb product (now owned by Oracle) that ran on VMS, Tandem's database system, IBM's db2 and probably many others.
  • Many libraries offer telnet now to check the card catalog. While a CLI might not be conciderd an "x-windows" interface, an Xterm sure is. A patent as vauge as that can surely be struck down by any log of someone telnetting to a library card catalog (relational database I think) using some form of an Xterminal.

  • Found in a quick google search... (Score:5)

    by jackmama ( 34455 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @02:35PM (#820936)
    This [ogi.edu] document, which is copyright 1993, describes a similar system. If nothing else, it may give you a starting point to talk to some people that developed similar applications prior to that one.
  • >3) IBM's callup application. It's a program to look up info on IBM employees, and it has every interface known to man. I'm willing to be that some Unix dork back in the day wrote an X front end to it. It's prolly even more than 3 tiers.

    You mean more than the 5250 emulator interface? 8^)
    --
  • I mean not disrespect to your post, as you are just as entitled to your opinion as I am (probably more so, considering I am still a minor ;-)), but, it seems to me like this person (regardless of whatever ulterior motives may exist) seems to be trying to do something positive for the whole community. I, for one, think it is a good thing that there are people who see something that doesn't quite sit right, and they say "We need to do something about this before the mole has time to fortify the mountain." Certainly, if unworthy patents being handed out like candy is front-page material, someone trying to stop such things from happening is just as newsworthy. Maybe there have been other patents we could've stopped. Sure, there's the possiblity that this person may stand to gain personally, but there can be positive reprecussions throught the community. (I'm probably starting to get repetitive, so I'll stop now. :-)) It may or may not be "news for nerds", but, to plagarize on of the other replies here, it is "stuff that matters." Besides, who better to ask than the multi-faceted Slashdot crowd? If there's anybody out there who know a solution to this dilemma, they probably visit Slashdot. :-)

    --Ricky
  • I'm pretty sure Quintus corporation (later purchased by Intergraph) had something which fits the bill. We purchased a license for it in 1992, but I'm pretty sure we weren't the first customers. I think the architecture was called WorkPro and the app was called CustomerQ or some such thing.

    Basically it was a call/bug tracking database. The client wasn't too thin, being written in Object Oriented Prolog w/ X extensions, but it had a remote DB server, an X-based client, and the ability to write application code in either a proprietary language or Prolog.

    It was the bane of my existence for several years. Hopefully it helps you more that it did me.

    Oskee-wow-wow,
    PlazMan
  • I thought of this also. I started as a freshman at MIT in 1991, and Zephyr was already very widespread. As far as database use, it used both Hesiod and Kerberos.

    Hesiod, according to this [mit.edu], is: The Hesiod name service allows an application to retrieve associations between a name, a particular type of service, and information about that named service. Some examples of this are course locker names and system libraries, other RVD or NFS lockers, usernames and passwd entries as found in /etc/passwd, printer information, such as might be found in /etc/printcap, service and mailbox locations, and service-to-port mappings, such as are found in /etc/services.

  • Here's one from the late 1980's (Score:4)

    by xixax ( 44677 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @05:02PM (#820941)
    http://www.computer.org/proceedings/meta97/papers/ pshelley/pshelley.html

    The paper describes components of a metadata system that uses middleware to combine an X11 UI with distributed databases. Was started in 1989 and I came across it in 1993 when it was well established and indeed in decline (the X11 client at any rate).

    Also:

    http://www.anu.edu.au/CNASI/pubs/OnDisc95/docs/O NL46.html

    X.
  • so you haven't been topriorart.com? [priorart.com]

  • Of course there is prior art! (Score:3)

    by msobkow ( 48369 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @03:10PM (#820943) Homepage Journal

    I worked with Nortel (then Northern Telecom) in the 1988-1990 period. They had production systems with Mac, Win3.1, and Unix/X11 front ends to RPC and TP based middleware. Not that I have any application or contact names, but there is no doubt the technology was already in use.

    Business/database computing classes also described such technologies when I was in university a couple years prior to that. Odds are there are some published research papers that not only describe the concept, but compare different implementations for performance.

    You also might want to check out IBMs patent database. Most of the n-tier technology concepts were the result of research originally targetted at scaling mainframe applications, including departmental FEPs (front-end processors, a specialized form of middleware.) The fact that X11 provides the display instead of a terminal or PC should be irrelevant.

  • Question, does something need to be in common use for it to be prior-art, or does it just need to 'exist' and have records of its creation and use?

  • Perl??? (Score:3)

    by glitch_ ( 48803 ) <email@ryanrinaldi.com> on Monday August 28, 2000 @03:57PM (#820945) Homepage Journal
    Bear with me...
    Perl was released, IIRC, in 1988-87. When perl is used in CGI scripting it is run on the server. Any web browser would be your X-window app, and you would just have to check to see when the first DB access MOD was written for Perl. If not perl, than maybe similiar scripting languages. It would all seem to fit...or I am completely off base and I will feel the flames lick at my feet
  • I was thinking the Zehpyr message system [mit.edu] might apply.

    It was created at MIT around 1990, or at least the document about it has Feb. 1990 as its first revision date.

    It's an instant messaging system, and as such, has some clients (some X clients, some tty, etc.), a distributed network, and servers which keep track of users, messages, and other stuff. Users can/could "subscribe" to certain classes of messages, which in effect causes the server to apply different filters to the messages that get percolated over the network to each user.

    Try the above URL for some documentation, here's more of the old docs [mit.edu] (postscript format).

    I can't really help you with contact information, but I'm sure there are a couple emails listed in the documentation somewhere.

  • If you admit that this sort of question can help the community as a whole, why does it matter that the answers will be used by only one person. This person is taking time to refute patent idocy, whic is a Good Thing. I would think the least /. can do is post it as a discussion and help out. I agree, there's a lot of stupid patents out there, and /. certainly can't be responsible for finding prior art for all of them, but this particular patent seems especially overbroad and far-reaching.

    As a side note, is there a stupid patent archive somewhere? Where people could post a link to a moronic patent and have others take a look at it. Sort of the Oracle for patents.

    Walt
  • I was the chief architect for a distribute persistent OO development system built on ObjectiveC and a relational database backend in 1986-1988. Unfortunately, it was about 5 years ahead of its time and became shelfware before release. But I might be able to dig up some of the code if it would help.

  • xrn (Score:5)

    by bwt ( 68845 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @02:50PM (#820949)
    xrn is the X-windows front end to NNTP news.

    I don't know when it was created, but xrn [mit.edu] has been around a while. It's on version 9.02 by now.

    I guess it's not really a "relational" database, though, but it certainly is a 3-tier database with X-windows front end.

  • Re:xrn (Score:1)

    by Baki ( 72515 )
    Bringing up questionble examples won't help such a case (rather damage it).

    xrn (usenet) is not really 3-tier. If something it is rather 2-tier. The client (xrn) connects to the server. The server is part of a "distributed database" if you will (certainly not an RDBMS), it does *not* behave like a middle tier.

  • Which patent is this? (Score:5)

    by rkent ( 73434 ) <rkent@post.ha r v a r d . edu> on Monday August 28, 2000 @03:24PM (#820951)
    Well, I can understand if the professor has been asked not to reveal the name of the offending patent, but that doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't know.

    Just in case I pick the right one: I hereby swear that I have never met or been in any sort of contact with Professor Winslett, and I'm just doing this to be a pest, and not out of any sort of collusion :)

    Anyway, some guesses:

    Bleagh... To find others possibilities, check here [ibm.com]. I've made myself sick looking through all these patents; I'm more convinced than ever that our USPTO is in bad need of an overhaul.
  • Although not X-Windows based, I was heavily involved in the design, building and deployment of a 3-tier Central Res. System for hotels called Global II. This system is still in use today by an international chain.

    Some facts:

    • Deployment date: February 9, 1988
    • End date: still running to this today for a major US-based chain (obviously changed over time)
    • Clients: MS-DOS originally, DOS/Windows now
    • Networking: X.25/X.29/Async/TCP-IP substrate with app-specific protocols on top
    • User base: 24x7 user base across 5 continents
    • Server: Stratus (VOS), always hosted in USA
    • Database: Initially file-system. Added Sybase support into production 1989/1990
    • Have manuals, have customer
  • I guess I should read slashdot more often. Of course I immediately thought of Moira; I was the project leader on it from 1987-1992.

    Moira is the configuration management system used by MIT Project Athena. It manages useraccounts, groups, mailing lists, filesystems, and other configuration data for a distributed system of 1000 systems and 20000 users. It features a relational database (originally Ingres, later ported to Oracle), and several network front ends. Originally, all of the front ends were character based, but we eventually made a couple of X-based graphical front ends too.

    It was first published outside MIT in a paper in the Winter 1988 Usenix Association conference proceedings. The first X-based client, xregister, went into use in 1991 if I remember correctly.

    You can check out the current version of Moira at http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/astaff/proje ct/moiradev/
  • Francois
    Schiettecatte
    FS Consulting
    Internet: francois@wais.com (now here [hummingbird.com])
    435 Highland Avenue
    Rochester, NY 14620
    Phone : (716) 256-2850
    Fax : (716) 473-9695

  • Re:WAIS Z39.50 1988 Linkage (Score:4)

    by Money__ ( 87045 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @03:32PM (#820955)
    Hey, try this: googl e search on"Z39.50-1988" [google.com]

    or this:http://www .cni.org/pub/NISO/docs/Z39.50-brochure/50.brochure .part01.html [cni.org]

    or this: http://www.i fla.org/documents/libraries/cataloging/metadata/gi ls-i.txt [ifla.org]

    That last link has a lot of very good low level contrast between the 1988 version and the early 90s version. Now all you need is someone to standup and swear they deployed Z39.50 1988 when it came out.

  • Hell RPI had terminal accessible card catalogs earlier than 1987 (Which is when I encountered them there.) I'm pretty sure the entire network was available from the sun lab in the upstairs of one of the buildings there, which was also where I encountered my first real GUI in the form of X.

    Of course, this sort of thing had been going on much longer, but instead of X and a GUI you had an IBM terminal and an input form. You could probably find that sort of thing going on since the '60's. Using X instead of a character based terminal to display the input form doesn't take a huge intellectual leap.

  • Sure! I tell you, you go patent it, and I'm left holding the bag ;-)

    I'd probably run such a thing as an expesnive subscription service. Larger companies wouldn't think twice about paying for a service like this, if even a couple of applications of it a year will save them some legal expenditures. Perhaps a tier-level approach where lower tiers could search the database for a low-low monthly price and higher tiers could commission you to go after a patent that's not currently in your database. Just a couple of ideas of course.

  • Sweet. I just assumed that it'd be snapped up by a live goat porn vendor or a squatter, like so many other domain names out there.

  • Hmm... Need a priorart.com... (Score:3)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @02:27PM (#820959) Homepage Journal
    As happy as the patent office is to grant any patent that comes down the pike, it seems you could make a very successful business model out of taking the patents as they're issued and finding all the instances of prior art that should have kept them from getting the patent in the first place. Maybe I should patent this business model...
  • why is this considered a troll? regardless of his views, he's got a good point. a little bit more info would be better than "there's something bad happening, let's get everyone on it."

    a good point was brought up.... although i agree that a patent like the one described would be truly horrible, i don't believe in focusing the entire force of slashdot (flames,trolls,ddos and all) at anyone without sufficient reason...

    i will be no one's pawn

  • Prior art, what's the use? Firstly, it needs to have been *publically published*, not just used. So there aren't very many applications to pick from. Graphical apps were all pretty much closed before the 90's. Without the details of the implementation disclosed *publically* (which is the whole meaning of the patent system), "prior art" is useless against this system.

    What I would place my bet on here, are magazines and scientific papers prior to '91, maybe newsgroups but I doubt that would stick in court. Search for elaborate articles that explain in detail what you're looking for. If you do, that should invalidate the patent, but I recommend asking your lawyers about it.

    But let's not forget the REAL issue here. These software patents shouldn't be accepted in the first place! It's like being forced to accept that Sun created Java, and live by their rules because it's suddenly ILLEGAL to develop something similar. Never mind that people have created Smalltalk, C++ and whatnot Java was based on. Accepting a patent is just like accepting being stolen of your lunch-money by big bullies.

    - Steeltoe

    A violent society breeds violence.
  • I thought patents had to be for non-obvious implementations of ideas?

    The whole idea of X is that you can have a graphical interface on machine A, with the program itself running on (presumably faster) machine B.

    It is therefore OBVIOUS that the program could be accessing a database on machine C.

    Also, if you want to find multi-tier database applications with an X or other graphical front end, seek out Progress Software Corporation. They have been doing client/server RDB stuff for a LONG time.

    I'm sure they'd be happy to help block a patent like the one described, which would utterly fuck them. (Unless it's them trying to get the patent, but I doubt it - IMHO they're not big enough to withstand comfortably the hostility such a move would earn them.)

    Good Luck

  • xrn was written by Rick Spickelmier and Ellen Sentovich at Berkeley in 1988. My small contribution to that effort was to add accelerators mapping to the rn/trn bindings since I hated mousing around to read news.
  • I could see somthing like this working like HotDispatch or eLance, where someone poses a question like "I need info on somhting like X that existed before Y", if you have info on it then you get $25 bucks. I could turn out to be the cheapest prior art search around. Of course I think patents like the one we are discussing here are farcical and I'm glad people are comitted to seeing them overturned. I can't help but think that the only difference between the architecture that has been patented here and hundreds of thousands of mainframe apps is the GUI in place of the CLI. Surely since desktop applications were moving to GUI it is obvious that the interfaces to mainframe or server based applications would also move in this direction? Isn't there some provision in patent law saying that only things that are not obvious to someone skilled in the art can be patented?
  • I don't know the exact nature of how Netrek kept track of it's internal user/password database, but it surely had such a database.

    And it was definitely X based and client server...

  • 1) Companies pay you not to research yours.

    2) Work secretly-- companies hire you to provide evidence when they sue over the bad patent.

    3) Work openly-- companies hire you to break their competitor's patents.

  • Intergraph builds an engineering drapting package which has been around since the early 1980's. It originally ran on PDP11's then VAX then Unix boxes. It is basically a GUI talking to a relational DBS with a bit of, well actually a lot of, code in between. All you need is an old brochure or magazine add from the appropriate year. In the same vane, you might try other CAD packages. Most ran on Unix before windows and all kind of fit the bill. Everyone except Sun used X. Mentor Graphics, Racal Redac come to mind. Ask someone from the engineering faculty who has been in the business for 10 - 15 years. Good Luck
  • It's a real shame this didn't catch on better, we've found it invaluable. We're still very happy with Ingres as our DB, FWIW.These days our primary interface is the web, of course.

    We've got about 40K users, lots of machines, printers, lists, filesystems, etc, all managed more-or-less without sysadmins (we do have 1 sysadmin, but she has other things to do -- mostly bug me for enhancements it seems :)

    Are you an instructor and want a maillist of your students (kept up to date with adds/drops for you)? Point, click, done. Want a file space 'locker', to go with that? point, click, done. Need to charge some printing to your department or to your U-Bill? You got it: point, click, done.

    I have always wanted to add a button [Random LART] though -- I figure it would be a real timesaver for some of our users :)

  • MIT's Moira fits the bill it would seem (Score:4)

    by john@iastate.edu ( 113202 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2000 @03:43AM (#820969) Homepage
    Moira is a system management system consisting of thin clients (command line, curses, X, web, etc) a middleware server and a relational DB under it all. We've been using it here since 1990 so it was obviously disclosed before 1991. Look in ftp://athena-dist.mit.edu/pub/ATHENA/moira for papers, source, etc.

  • UIM/X was a tool that was around in 1991 and did a good job - it was a development/ ide tool but I remember the guys that were playing with it were also connecting to a SQL database and somehow I think that might be a possible tool for you that parallels what you are doing. INGRES was still around then tool, and sybase - they all had these kind of connectivity widgets. Good luck.
  • The client (CGS) for Cybergraphic Inc's newspaper publishing systems does this. It's written in Pascal and acts as a VT100/FIMS terminal over TCP/IP to a relational database running on a VAX. It has a bitmapped "draw" mode, which is basically a "print preview" of the current page or take. CGS ran on DOS PCs and UNIXWARE. We bought it in 1990/1, and it wasn't new then.

    Cybergraphic was bought by Geac (geac.com), the buyer-of-all-things. They'd probably share your interest in this patent.

  • While the original poster may be overly cynical he hits a very valid mark. Enlisting the "zealotry" of /.ers without full disclosure is _not_ very cool. I think it is very rude to ask someone to do something and not tell them why or who for.

    In my opinion, it isn't about paranoia, but common courtesy.

    Then again, maybe I just like to know who I'm about to screw/help.

    I strongly suspect that had the story's poster not been so forthright about which details she could not legally divulge, it never would have occurred to you to question what she did tell you.

  • When I worked at Hamilton Standard (now Hamilton Nordstrom) they had a "TDB" (Template Database) that was used extensively in the software group. I haven't worked there since 93 (and when I used it, it was at least 5 years old). This was done using a TPU generated GUI for a database running on a Digital VAX and displayed on VT340 screens.

    I would think that this would fit what this person is thinking of.

    And with the government requirement for documentation, all projects that used this TDB, would have it in their SOW (Statements of Work) and SDP (Software Development Plans).

  • WAIS (Score:4)

    by burris ( 122191 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @03:04PM (#820974)
    WAIS seems to fit the bill. A client, some server code, and a relational database back end.

    "Grant 'em all and let the courts sort 'em out." - USPTO Motto

  • Here we go, the three tiers of something like AOLame or Compu$erve:
    1. rxvt or other terminal through a serial line
    2. The front end BBS server
    3. The back end database

    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • they werent saying that slashdot was an example of prior art, just that the scope of the patent is so wide that it would effect loads of sites, including slashdot.
  • Hahahhahahahaha....The PTO used just such a system (PALM III) that started in the mid-late 70's, Burroughs 6700, lots of Dumb Terminals and barcode scanners. It's primary initial use was...keeping track of the Patent Application File wrappers.
  • Yup -- that's based on ObjectStore -- I used to work at ObjectDesign, and was aware of MANY 3 tier projects with ObjectStore behind them, and X Windows in front -- but that's an object-oriented database, so doesn't count. And I started there in '94, so that's a little late. I bet IBM would have done something with a relational engine, they were doing a lot of 3-tier stuff. And I bet ODI sales folks from the time would remember what else was out there -- after all, it was the COMPETITION. Surely the big RDBMS companies could tell you what their customers were doing at the time.
  • Check out Omnis [omnis.net]. They have a RAD tool that might (back in '91) have fit the model you describe. Tbey've been providing application development tools w/UI and DB backends for 20 years.

  • Re:Hmm... Need a priorart.com... (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @04:58PM (#820980) Journal

    The Washington Post ran an article about a consultant in LA who is making money on prior art searches. Companies involved in disputes like this will gladly pay the guy thousands of dollars so they can beat the patent and avoid paying some other company millions of dollars. Sorry, it was the dead tree edition, which is now decaying very slowly in a landfill, so I can't tell you the URL for the article.

  • One of the first things that I learned in a graphics design class in college was that fonts are just little pictures that stand for sounds.

    Unless your dumb terminal used sound to tell you the letters on the screen, a la "War Games," then you used a graphical terminal when you used a dumb terminal. The only difference is that the graphics displayed were little pictures that represent sounds.

    The capital letter A is an example of this. Draw a bulls head with a large set of horns, now turn your drawing upside down. Looks a little like the letter A, doesn't it? So anytime you see an A on the screen you are looking at the picture of a cow. Each letter can be traced back to similar little pictures over the course of thousands of years.

    Even dumb terminals are pretty smart. Dumb terminals need to process their input in order to properly display the characters in the correct positions, and with the proper attributes. Not to mention keep track of where the cursor is on the screen. Each terminal type used different control characters embedded into the text stream in order to accomplish this processing. Anyone who has ever tried to use the wrong terminal type or had their shell set to the wrong terminal size knows how screwed up your terminal could get if you sent the wrong characters.

    So, fonts are graphics and dumb terminals are clients that process their input. Things just aren't as clear as those patent people would like us to believe.

    Any program that accessed any collection of data and then used the curses library to display to a terminal should meet his needs...

  • Re:what underlying political motivations? (Score:4)

    by NaughtyEddie ( 140998 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @02:54PM (#820984)
    perhaps he works for some small software startup

    Or perhaps she is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois.

  • Ok, maybe you should explain your political motivations? Financial gain? I don't think enlisting the zealotry of /.ers without full disclosure is very cool. After all, if RMS gets his way, all us coders will be on collective farms in his stoneheaded communist utopia. Support BSD style license which are truly free without the encumberances of political agendas!!

    If you already suspect someone of having the wrong ends in mind, why would you have any incentive to believe the reason they give?

    The paranoid view (which is my view, generally) would be that a corporation (or an agent thereof) would say anything they had to say to get the proper information. They might be saying they're only trying to quash a patent that should never have been granted, but perhaps they have some more nefarious goal. Why would you believe that they have only honesty in them?

    At the same time, from this message it seems clear that they are looking for someone else's product, which they could hardly patent. So assuredly this is only for their own purposes, but it seems as if it should help the rest of us. You are probably better off making your judgement on whether or not to help them based on the information you actually DO have; Someone is trying to crush a patent that ostensibly should never have been granted. The terms they are using sound sufficiently broad.

    On the other hand, they could conceivably be trying to use this information to remove a patent that some company is protecting a reputable piece of software with because they have no other means. Are you going to believe what they tell you? That's your decision. Personally, I believe that when it comes to corporations, relying on information the corporations give you is always a mistake. On the other hand, perhaps he works for some small software startup which is still full of righteousness and piety.

    Anything's possible, I guess.

  • Blockquoth the poster:
    why is this considered a troll?
    Probably due to the off-topic, irrelevant, and (on slashdot) inflammatory reference to RMS and the philosophy of "Free Software".

  • Prior art by SAIC (Score:3)

    by codepunk ( 167897 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @05:24PM (#820993)
    I used to be in the military and worked on a hp box that had a app like you mention well before 1991. The application was called JOTSII it had a motif front end with tons of middleware as well as database backends to store communications data. I am sure that you could do a little surfing using the JOTSII name and come up with a ton of stuff. JOTSII stands for joint operational tactical system. SAIC is Science Applications International Corporation and another company called INRI was also involved in the development.
  • Hmmm. I was a student at Yale in 1989-93. At that time we had telnet access [yale.edu] to the card catalog, from Macintosh as well as dumb terminal. (We had wired dorm rooms in 1992 - pretty advanced for the time.) Before that I briefly attended the University of Michigan, which also has telnet access [umich.edu] to its library, although I don't know when these were made available via the net.

    I bet you could find someone who used Xterminal to access one or both of these pre-1992...

    sulli

  • UIUC could be a part of some big scam too, you can never be too paranoid!

    Yeah, Mosaic led to Netscape, which led to Mozilla...

    sulli

  • Yeah, I'd really like to know more about the specific patent. If the person is in litigation, I'd assume the patent owner is the one who filed...And my guess in that case would be that its not IBM.

    I'm not aware of IBM being particularly litigious with their myriad of patents. And if it were IBM, I think we might have heard more about this case, even if its a small one.

  • I seem to remember X-Windows interfaces to the old Archie FTP database. That might fit all the requirements you listed.

    -Matt

  • 3-Tier (Score:5)

    by caver ( 208346 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @02:30PM (#821021) Homepage
    1. I can't recall it's name, it was 12 years ago.
    2. It was created by a man named Guy Pope, at the USAF Standard System Center, Gunter AFB, Montgomery Albama.
    3. It allowed users to enter/retrieve records (accounting information).
    4. It was released before I started working for them in June 1988.
    5. I really can't point out where to find it (it is a military application, though). You might want to try to contact them about it. The group is GAFS (General Acounting and Finance Systems).
    6. You can contact me (caver@caver.org) as I will swear it was there. I was the release manager for our group for 2 years, I ought to know what I released.

    It was a C front end, runing over DOS, that allowed you to enter information that was then sent to a COBOL back end (yes, COBOL) which then retrieved/wrote the data from/to an AFORMS (Air Force blah blah Relational blah blah blah) database.

    We didn't think this was original in 1988, how they thought it was original in 1991 is beyond me.
  • I don't think browsers became common use for awhile after 1991 (Mosaic was 1991??) and the Perl CGI interface came afterwards... However, would email lists factor in here?? There were plenty of X-Win Email clients, and many lists goto databases (Depends on the use of the list)
    - There is no work, there is no work...
    - Damn, it worked for Neo!
    -

  • If you need to know more (Score:5)

    by winslett ( 227492 ) on Monday August 28, 2000 @03:43PM (#821032)
    If you know of an appropriate application, but don't know enough about this case to commit to disclosure, and have questions that I'm not allowed to answer (is the case really important to my employer? who is suing whom? is this person really who she says she is? etc.) then I can ask the lawyers to call you. I would think that it would be in the lawyers' best interest to answer your questions if doing so would give them another compelling example of prior art, especially if your example was in wide use.

    --Marianne Winslett

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