Around 1983, in a meeting with Dr. Ted Hoff, the architect of the first microprocessor at Intel, the 4004, he gave me a perspective on ideas that has stayed with me. He said. "Everyone has ideas. It's only the people who can make something of them that count." From 1989-1999 I ran a software company and my employees used to come to me with great ideas for what the company should do next. Most of these were software developers. I told them that I couldn't commit the resources the idea needed, but I would give them all the leeway I could to make something of the idea themselves. And they hardly ever did. Programmers have software ideas. Non-programmers have software ideas. Some of each group will succeed in implementing them, but very few.

Acacia's patent examiner never looked at the Object View Broker technology from 1994. That in turn was based on an object-oriented semantic modeling tool called Open Books, released by Open Books, Inc, in Cambridge, MA around 1990. That was written in C and released for the OS/2 platform. It wasn't successful in the market because it came out much too early, but it was a brilliant piece of technology that most prospects didn't understand at that time. And Open Books itself was based on the Camps Planning Architecture, a LISP-based technology developed by Mitre Corporation for NASA and DOD in the 1980s. If I remember correctly, it was the basis for some of the early space shuttle mission planning system tools because of the way it could tie together different relational databases.