To say nothing of the Japanese, Indian and Chinese space efforts that have gone from nothing to orbital capability in the last 30 years. China now has put people into space too on their own. Japan and India are sure to follow (though Japan has used Russian flights for this so far I think).

The above poster is correct though in reprimanding US-centric thinking. I'm sure there are also still a few British people who think the UK is actually a dominant world power in space - which it was in the 50s.

I have an old version of vi for DOS that is about 30k in size. It's written in assembler and was the very first editor I used in my first programming job back in '85. It was great because it had all the functionality I need and easily fitted on those early 128k floppy disks so I took it everywhere when visiting clients and kept a copy in the car glove compartment just in case. I'd hate to think how many floppies I would have need for emacs (and they didn't make Hummers back them to carry the disks)....

I presented public lectures on a system I developed called Cyberterm, back in the early 90s. I presented lectures at UK VR_SIG Meeting at deMontfort University in Leicester in 1995 and at the HITL (Human Interface Technology Lab) at the University of Washington in that same year. I can name names or people in attendance if required.

Each talk was advertised and attended by the general public and outlined Cyberterm's use of pretty much exactly the system described in the patent (which I had up and running at the time). The system had also been demonstrated to numerous other people around the world at the time and since then and was written about in WAVE and Virtual magazines in the late 90s and described in written detail in many online papers as well as a series of ariticles in the PCVR-Magazine (also in the late 90s). Some of these articles are still available online archived by the HITL Librarian.

As the author of this system and the underlying technology, I would say I have some copyright ownership of the technology I developed. I still have archives of the earlier code and it runs with a copyright message.

I'll be happy to claim a big chunk of any money worlds.com make. Patent attorneys and lawyers of other companies (NC-Soft for instance) wishing to defend themselves can contact me via linkedin.com (amongst other places).

There was a great sci-fi movie back in the 60s, "Crack in the World" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059065/ that had a similar story line to this, only it ended up with a rift forming in the earth's crust that spread across Africa and they used nukes to end it all, causing a huge chunk of crust to be hurled into space. Life imitates art again.