@EditorDavid do you want to publish this as its own story ?

Strictly speaking, OS/2 saturated its market, got sold off, and its replacement was Linux. If you want an OS/2 nowadays, you can go here https://www.ecomstation.com/ and find a price. Most of us choose Linux, though. Here's my shot ! https://github.com/tjcw/screen...

@beauhd If you want to post this as a story, it's fine by me

https://www.linux.com/news/lin... describes a Linux distribution which runs as a screensaver for Microsoft Windows. That version is downloadable here https://sourceforge.net/projec... ( check the sha256sum ) and the best-so-far version is here https://sourceforge.net/projec... . There is further documentation here https://github.com/tjcw/screen... . Ark by amateurs, Titanic by Professionals !

You can alternatively give your business address. But that is no fun !

And thereby something in the public interest of th USA.

I thought this was so that a competitor business could approach the inventor and try to hire them away, i.e. an antimonopoly effect and one which raises salaries of inventors. I have patented inventions for my employer but unfortunately no competitor has ever approached me !

Download several Linuxes --- there are lots at https://linuxtracker.org/ --- and try installing and administering them

I think we've had metered pay-as-you-go telephony experiences for most of the last century. Just ask AT&T how their business has worked over the decades. It's kind-of pointless indicating to the USPTO that there is abundant ancient prior art, but I expect that if Microsoft ever try selling a licence to this patent, it will get invalidated within seconds.

It's not likely that the ISP would stay in business long if they did that. I imagine it would be considered criminal fraud if you kept taking someone's money and stopped providing the service you had contracted to provide.

Try http://opensuse.org/ . You can set this up so you can get a 'console' session from a web browser (using VNC and java, if you must know); there are more secure ways of doing it, but that will get you started. Backup tends to be application-specific; figure out how to take backups of your database, and how you will test your ability to restore from them.