Presumably its a co-ordination language and data flows between stones down and to the right. Perhaps Black and white might just represent arity and what a stone actually did might not be denoted by color. You would have monadic stones (white?) and dyadic stones (black?) and the syntax would require that monadic stones have at most one stone above or to the left since they can only accept one input at a time.
Either that or the language would be weakly typed and data arriving from above or from the left would be processed separately.
The board would have a left and a top which would accept inputs from the environment but could extend infinitely to to bottom and right.
Is the "must be Apple branded" alsewhere in the EULA?
That would have been around 1984 or 5 I think. So yes, it was "usual" or at least published by way of a software product by around the mid 80s. So certainly by 1991 it was not new. I don't believe I invented the idea either - in any case, it was certainly an idea that would have occured to anybody "versed in the arts" back then. Back then the process was done by phone. You generated your unique id, called us and we have you a hashed key to unlock the functionality derived from your generated key.
Just for amusement, this was done in Australia too. Not that that means this earlier system should have been known to the patentee.
"May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe