'We invented Windows 8 Tiles in the 1990s', says firm suing Microsoft Microsoft had barely got Windows 8 out the door before it was slapped with a patent lawsuit related to the new OS. Software and OS design tech firm SurfCast has filed a suit in Maine over Live Tiles, which it says it invented. The company has just four patents, but one of them, filed in 2000 and granted in 2004, deals with a " …
"It is the live updating content plus being selectable that they seem to be claiming for.
Even then this is pretty weak - you could it with iframes from whenever ago"
It sounds more to me like those "trial" WinZip count-down buttons with the disabled continue button and a timer. That's live updating content (the timer value) on a button (tile with a border.) Those were around back in Win 3.1 times.
It is the live updating content plus being selectable that they seem to be claiming for.
I remember icons on a X desktop doing that (content updates while still an icon) in the early 90's (and that is when I remember it - I suspect they'd been around for a while before I saw them).
The only novelty here is writing a patent to cover something obvious that already existed. Oh, wait - that's not novel either....
I remember icons on a X desktop doing that (content updates while still an icon) in the early 90's (and that is when I remember it - I suspect they'd been around for a while before I saw them).
The same thing occurred to me, and some X apps that did this were available back in the late '80s. I think there was an X11 CPU load applet that was part of the Athena distribution, or maybe the Andrew stuff, that did this - when iconified ("minimized", for the unwashed), it displayed a graph of recent CPU load that was updated every few seconds.
But then it's very hard to see how "selectable icons with updating content" are significantly different from "selectable windows with updating content". I haven't read the patent, but I may, just to see if there are any even vaguely original claims there.
It is where the US patent system has completely screwed the pooch. Originally the idea was that somebody had an idea for something - such as a flying car - and someone thought of a way to do it. It was the way to do it, the invention, that was patentable.
Now the US seems willing to patent the idea regardless of the method, so if you think of a flying car but have no idea how to do it, and I invent the helicopter, you can stop me making it because you had the idea first.
As the rest of the world works around this epic IP fail, the US is slowly going to sink into irrelevance, because the idea for a product should not be patentable. If this silly company regurgitates the idea of mini-windows running applications that you can bring to the front by clicking on them, and Microsoft then finds a way to make it work taking into account multitasking, shared resources and all the rest of it, then they are the inventors.
I'm so tiled, I mean tired.
Oberon Operating System circa 1985, maybe. MAYBE?
Also the ACME text editor...
There has got to be precedent for that before 2000.
If the patent holds, then lots of things are in trouble. I'm running an ancient Ubuntu 10.04, and on the bar I've got on the right side are live-updating icons for system load, network activity, disk activity, weather/temperature, CPU clock speed, ... Having that stuff there is why I run Gnome2 instead of something even simpler like TWM. Even under that, or way back under SunOs, the system load things were small tile-looking entities that continuously updated.
Indeed, my thoughts too - Active Desktop (in Windows 98 IIRC) offered rectangular boxes of IE-rendered content obtained by subscribing to content 'channels' and updated live from the Internet.
It was atrocious, and the first thing I disabled on installing any W98 machine, but it clearly predates the patent, although as I really can't stand to read the patent it probably specified some miniscule difference, such as a shade of blue, or the fact it updates while the user is sitting down.
>If the patent office grants a patent that the courts have to strike down, then the patent office pays all court costs.
So let me get this straight you want politicians who become politicians because the love spending other people's money (gives em a stiffy) to not only risk a cash cow revenue source but also potentially cut down on the billable hours of their lawyer buddies (most who make laws also practice law, the ultimate vested interest). Hahaha good one.
Oh aye. I used quote marks for that, among other, reason. But the courts are more likely to take them seriously, or at least make a significant award, if the patent represents a real product, and they were active in protecting it. At least, that's what I would hope or expect from an honest judge.
But it was WP7 with this before. Totally credible that they just didn't know enough about WP7 to investigate. Kind of a fail, that one. I don't have much love for most software patents, even having been paid to write a whole mess of them (and mine start out honest and reasonable, though lawyers can fix that for me) and read many more on various technologies being developed. They are still technically based on implementation not idea. But that's been lax in SW patents, which no longer require source code. Worse still in business method and design patents, which don't really answer the important question: why is this even an invention.
For once I'll be on Microsoft's side in this fight.
First example off the top of my head is the system tray next to the clock on the task bar. Introduced in Windows 95. Take task manager for instance - when minimized it shows a mini graph in real time of cpu usage, but when clicked on it magically opens the application.
(http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2007/07/29/simple-windows-task-manager-tips/ shows this even happened all the way back before this amazing patent was discovered.)
I'm pretty sure Active Desktop could do all sort of wacky things like this as well - it was microsofts first attempt at tiles and widgets etc.
I was thinking much the same ... I remember seeing demos of Windows 1.0 with multiple tiled windows (Windows 1 didn't support overlapping windows) showing content that updated in real time -- the clock was always one of the windows (and the others were usually filled with bouncing balls and the like, because there was no internet them, and not much that could be used as a live data feed).
It's not surprising that nobody much saw the point at the time.
This is just the same rubbish that Microsoft have tried to fob off on us with Active Desktop and Vista "Widgets" ... and there's nothing to it that you can't achieve by opening some ordinary applications and arranging their windows where you want on the screen (apart from the fact that these windows annoyingly stay put when you "Show Desktop").
Yes, here we go again, flimsy patents, no working model, no search for previous art and no sense at all, anything goes, as long as you pay. But lets not forget that Microsoft does the same with thousands of similar silly patents, and they are very proud about it. And they are much more dangerous and will support the rotten system because they will win more than they loose.
Wow! That image that you linked to is great! The resemblance between the old AOL start page and the Windows 8 Start Screen is rather striking! Even sadder still is that I actually remember having to use a version of AOL like that way back in the 90's, as it was the only local ISP that still supported the old hand-me-down Windows For Workgroups 3.11 machine that I used as a high school student during that time. Every other ISP demanded Windows 95 as a minimum, and that would have been a bit much for the ol' 16MHz 386SX with 16MB of RAM to handle!
"The SX was a typical Intel marketing ploy."
True. But what else is new when it comes to corporate product names?
"It was more like a 286 with some tweaks than a genuine 386."
Incorrect. It had the complete 386 instruction set.
"For one thing it had a 16 bit external data bus."
True. At the time, that was hardly an issue for most folks, though.
"Windows 95 needed the 32 bit bus of the DX."
Incorrect. I have a 386 that runs Win95. Painfully slowly, but it runs.
"Every other ISP demanded Windows 95 as a minimum"
Bullshit. I still connect to systems that require nothing more than a dumb terminal and a modem. That's today, in 2012. I still use UUCP internally, too ... nothing else beats it for functionality.
Glitter is not the be-all & end-all, people ... information, on the other hand, is.
The way I see it is this is different from the "widgets" you are talking about as they specify windows tiles ie what were icons to launch programs on older versions of windows.
The only thing I can see where they would not win is if their patent covers icons in the old sense to launch the app/program or if this is only some sort of widget and limited in what it covers.
I doubt it can be widgets though or they would have gone after Android etc ages ago.
Having had a look at the patent, what they had is a system which shows part of a window in a tile like grid. Not the same as a tile, which is a device to show information specifically designed to fit into that tile, such as unread emails, clips of a picture from a library, the weather outside etc. etc.
I strongly suspect that Lotus Notes would have a claim of prior art as its client has had a system of tiles on a grid which dynamically update (albeit only with unread numbers.)
Was on my mind, too. The old drawers and file cabinet version. IIRC, any old good dev could place text and dynamic info on the drawer face.
Also springing to mind is Killer Windows Utilities, iirc, published by Que. I bought it for Win 3.1 to get more desktops, more gadgets, and much more functionality from windows than ms provided until win 95 came along with a gui bolted to dos.
I would have felt sympathy for the patent-claiming company, but they seem to have gambled on goosing ms. Once again, never thought i would come down on ms' side., as ironic and quasi embarrassing as it may be.
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