BT's Hyperlinking Patent Refuted

parvati writes "According to a newscientist.com story a 1968 Stanford University film demonstrating the use of the first mouse may be used to refute BT's claim of a 1976 patent on hyperlinks. In the film the mouse is used to click on hyperlinks." I've got a patent pending on swallowing, oxidation, and chewing gum.

Protesting against patents

Hey,

Admittedly I've just started this site, but the first petition I've set up is against software patents.

Go to http://freepetitions.com/cgi- bin /fpt/view.cgi?id=1 [freepetitions.com] and put your name against software patents. I believe that patents really work against the industry as a whole and we do need to protest.

thenerd.

REALLY not new

It's good that someone has proof that hyperlinking is really not a new idea. Of course people do it on the web today, and they did it in gopher, but as far as I'm concerned, references and footnotes in a paper do the same conceptual thing, as does the index in the back of a book, or the table of contents in the front. It does the same thing, too; it points you to a number (a link) where you can find the information on the subject (text of link). Then you follow the link (turn to the page) and read the linked information.

Asimov would often work in uses of hyperlinking in his stories; he was a big fan of it, and thought that if you had a machine that could track your eye movements, then if you stared at a word longer than necessary, it could make references pop up in the margins, and explain the subject. And that was a long time ago, and Asimov is dead now.

The only thing new about hyperlinking was the idea that you could somehow automate this process, but that's not new; people always want to automate things. I'm sure people have said for as long as books have been around in their current form: gee, it'd be nice if I already had this information I wanted on the page in front of me...

Yet another obvious implementation of a real world phenomenon that's unique now because it's on the net.

In the future, this will be abbreviated YAOIOARWPTUNBIOTN.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

Take a Vacation ...

Rob, you're losing it. How many redundant stories have been posted this week?

Apparently, you are the only one posting to the site this weekend. Take some time off. A week would do you good.

And when you get back consider instituting some kind of Quality Assurance program for the site. It's really getting sad to see all the redundant posts ... and the legitimate ones are OLD news once they get posted.

Re:Protesting against patents

How ironic that your petiton site is sponsored by amazon.com, one of the biggest stupid patent holders we discuss on Slashdot!

What are you thinking?


---There is no spoon....---

A little concerned

I won't complain as vitriolically as some about the recent spate of duplicate stories on slashdot, but the fact that this same story was posted two or three days ago (see it here [slashdot.org]) is troubling.

Has slashdot grown so large that there are perhaps too many people with the ability to post stories? Or does it need someone "at the top" to make sure duplicates like this don't get through? Is slashdot so big that it just can't be managed by anybody? I hope not, but I'm really curious; what's breaking down so much that this keeps happening?

Maybe we can have some constructive discussion instead of the regular round of "slashdot's gone downhill" talk. To CmdrTaco and the rest: We know you're all busy. But can you work this out?

-schussat

Hey!

I have a patent on posting redundant patent stories on Slashdot!! You will be hearing from my attorney shortly.

Re:CEASE AND DESIST ORDER:

This 'oxidation' infringes on patent number 623326 for our product 'Rust'

Well, your patent number (623326) infringes on my patent (123321) on having patent numbers that are palindromes.

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