IP Innovation L.L.C. and Technology Licensing Corporation (collectively, "Plaintiffs") have brought a patent-infringement action against Red Hat, Inc., and Novell, Inc., alleging infringement of U.S. Patent Numbers 5,072,412; 5,533,183; and 5,394,521. The patents concern a user interface that has multiple workspaces. The Plaintiffs' complaint identifies as accused products "Red Hat Linux system," the "Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop," and the "Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server."
UPDATE: THESE THREE PATENTS WERE INVALIDATED BY THE U.S. DISTRICT COURT, EASTERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS, ON APRIL 30, 2010, IN THE ABOVE REFERENCED ACTION.
UPDATE: THESE THREE PATENTS WERE INVALIDATED BY THE U.S. DISTRICT COURT, EASTERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS, ON APRIL 30, 2010, IN THE ABOVE REFERENCED ACTION.
WHAT'S NEEDED: REQUEST FOR INFORMATION
Prior Art
Products On Sale, Offered for Sale or Publicly Used Prior to March 25, 1987
February 13th, 2009
This patent application was filed on March 25, 1987. Such prior art may include products embodying the invention that were sold, offered for sale, or publicly used by the patent holder, an inventor, or any third party prior to March 25, 1987.
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from wikipedia about 1984 program I used to use:
Symphony is a DOS program that is loaded entirely into memory when started. Using ALT-F10 the user can alternate among the five "environments" of the program, each a rendering of the same underlying data. The environments are:
* SHEET, a spreadsheet program very similar to 1-2-3
* DOC, a word processor
* GRAPH, a graphical charting program
* FORM, a table-based database management system
* COMM, a communications program
Digital Research had a windowing system, GEM in use about that time. It was available for the PC, and was also used on the Amiga. Apple's LISA certainly predates the patent too.
GEM 1.0 was a surprisingly advanced graphics system for the time.
Novell bought DRI, so they should have the source code somewhere.
I believe even the SAGE had multiple "workspaces". According to this article, the operator could select from 15 "views" on the display.
http://history.sandiego.edu/GEN/20th/sage.html
I believe the SAGE air defense system might be prior art. The operator could select different views on the display by flipping (physical) switches.
http://history.sandiego.edu/GEN/20th/sage.html
http://www.mitre.org/about/photo_archives/photos/hi_res/sage_f1693.tif
FYI, this patent appears to apply most directly to the Xerox PARC 'ROOMS' project.
This was a sort of workspace manager with multiple 'rooms' that contained other windowed objects. Each room could contain multiple objects in some useful grouping. Unlike the Symphony example, IIRC this offered views of a specific object from different 'rooms', which seems to be a key idea in the patent.
I saw an early version in the 1980s on a Xerox LISP workstation, and it sure seemed quite innovative to me. (Sorry, no specific dates.)
For one description of a (later) commercial spinoff product, see
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/software/xerox-rooms/index.html
Although the patent seems pretty solidly based on the Rooms work at PARC, a lot of the claims read as if they're describing the window/screen system of the Amiga OS Workbench, first sold in 1985. The windowing system was, of course, a typical windowing system, but underneath that was a provision for an arbitrary number of screens of potentially different resolutions and bit depths, each opening on a space of arbitrary (limited by memory, of course) size. There were provisions for keeping (parts of) many screens visible on a physical monitor at the same time so that a user could go back and forth among them, for selecting the desired screen from the keyboard, programmatically and so forth. It was also fairly common to use different screens to represent different views of the same object.
In addition to the computers themselves, there was a series of published books documenting the hardware and software, including the window/screen system.
VisiCorp's Visi On was released in 1983. It meets claim 1 and the remarkably similar independent claims. See http://toastytech.com/guis/vision.html .
Tandy DeskMate (1985) was a text-based GUI, meeting several claims. See http://toastytech.com/guis/deskmate.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeskMate for more.
Byte published a pre-1.0 demo run-through in December 1983. See http://toastytech.com/guis/win1983.html . Microsoft Windows 1.01, Copyright 1985, meets several of these claims. See http://toastytech.com/guis/win101.html as well as http://www.microsoft.com/windows/WinHistoryDesktop.mspx for more information.
GEM 1.1 was released in 1985. It permitted multiple on-screen windows at a time, presenting independent information. See http://toastytech.com/guis/gem11.html for screenshots.
This is a bit of a stretch, but there were a number of 1980's computer games (or maybe it was a TSR program that would work with any game?) that would suspend and place a simulated spreadsheet on the screen when a certain key was pressed. This was for the benefit of boss and coworkers. The point is the end result simulates a multi-workspace environment, one workspace for games and another for a spreadsheet.
I don't remember the date but back when Windows 2.x(?) was current, there was a addon from HP called Dashboard, I believe, which implemented a classic multi-desktop, where you could have 4 or more 'virtual desktops' that could be jumped between by clicking on the appropriate box on the Dashboard toolbar, very very much like the typical toolbar on X Windows managers like Gnome or KDE.
oh yeah, DESQview, from Quarterdeck, was widely available in the mid 80s, it offered multiple desktop views of MSDOS programs.
1976, famous editor VI - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi - two working zones (editing & command).
1984 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_(office_suite)
Had support of multiple workspaces.
The AT&T 5620 - http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/att/5620/
link from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)
Borland Sidekick, sold in 1983, was a Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) program, allowing instantaneous task switching.
The "screen" program was published in comp.sources.unix on 7 Aug 87.
http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/usenet/comp.sources.unix/volume10/screen/
Since it was posted in Aug 87, it is possible there are previous versions that were made available by the author (Oliver Laumann) prior to that.
http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/cms/detail.php?id=96
Quaterdeck DesqView and IBM TopView are all from the 1985-88 era
see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopView
see also GEM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager
I used Sun workstations back in 1986 that had multiple workspaces. Perhaps Sun can help?
as already mentioned, the Amiga platform - launched with the A1000
publically launched at sold in 1985 had, as its GUI, a system called 'workbench' - on the main workbench itself (known as the 'desktop' to windows folk) was a bar (just like the app bar in OSX) att he top-right were two icons - one flipped the current workbench to the front, the other to the back. The bar itself was a dragbar and could be used to move the current view up and down - EVEN WITH DIFFERENT RESOLUTIONS. yep, pretty good stuff - but you couldnt do much with the supplied memory - just 3 2bit workbenchs if I recall...so you bought more memory and then could so much more.
draggable screens are very important (or were ;-) ) to some people. more info eg here:
http://www.basden.demon.co.uk/amiga/amiga.diffnt.html#screens
I want to add "getty" under Microsoft Xenix (or AT&T Unix?) allowed you to login multiple times on the same workstation and have multiple workspaces at the terminal prompt. Switching between them was done with the ALT-F1, ALT-F2, etc. keys. This was in the early 80s prior to this 1987 patent.
I used Software Carousel. It allowed you to switch between different resident MS-DOS programs, each running in their own desktop/workspace.
From: http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Software-Carousel
"Software Carousel was a task-switching program for MS-DOS-based computers. It was introduced in February 1986 by Softlogic Solutions, Inc. Its functionality was similar to MS-DOS's DOS-SHELL, which was released at a later date."
Larry Johnson mentions Symphony. My first PC, bought in early 1987, had a DOS office suite widely available, called Ability Office. Like Symphony, it offered different views of the same data. If this is relevant, it could well be that the produce now being marketed at http://www.asiability.com/webpage.aspx?p=207 is a direct descendent, and that they may be able to provide evidence of its earliest incarnation.
Mac OS "Switcher" was released in 1985, which allowed you to switch between multiple arbitrary programs.
There was also a program called "Finder Keeper" (I think that's what it was called) that kept the Finder memory-resident while another program was running, and worked with Switcher; the two concepts were later combined into the "MultiFinder" of later versions of MacOS (but that came out after your priority date).
I may have a MacOS bootable diskette with Switcher and Finder Keeper installed on it, but I don't know if it is still readable nor what the exact date of the disk is.
Here is some possible prior art from not so restricted to the Desktop GUI industry: the multimedia communications system. This is described in the ITU-T T.120 series specifications. The specifications provide for a system of audio, video and data (application sharing) between systems and MCS is a protocol based on the MCV paradigm. The protocol permits a single workstation to participate in multiple sessions (or workspaces) with different view (joining different shared applications) and provides a data model for supporting it. It appears to directly address the pertinent claims.
These protocols and services were specified by ITU-T as early as 1993; however, I happen to know that they were contributed to ITU-T by a commercial company that provided complete multimedia conferencing systems for use both in Canada and the US prior to 1990 and were likely developed prior to the application date on the patent. (IIRC the product was the GMCS (Generalized Multimedia Conferencing System, or some such).
It might be of interest to those looking for another angle on the claims.
The Sun 3/110 workstation had a dual frame buffer that could be configured as a back and white frame buffer and a color frame buffer. SunOS supported having different workspaces (windows and icons) on each frame buffer. You would switch between the frame buffers by dragging the mouse to the edge of the screen. It also worked with workstations that had two frame buffers and two monitors. The important distinction for the 3/110 is that the two logical frame buffers drove a single monitor.
Some information on this can be found in the cg4 section at:
http://www.sunhelp.org/faq/FrameBufferHistory.html
I have found a reference to the Sun 3/110 being introduced in August of 1986 at:
http://www.kiwigeek.com/hjp/comps/Sun_3-110/
If this is useful, I can probably find more information if asked.
I'm having some trouble figuring out exactly what in the claims are unique to the implementations of the patent in Rooms and in Cedar Desk Tops (see section G of the patent) and what was already in the earlier systems that are referenced in the patent. For a specific list of systems, see the paper by the authors of the patent at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=24056 and in particular the paragraph with heading "Multiple virtual workspaces". It talks about Smalltalk Projects, the CCA system, and the Cedar programming environment multiple desktop overview. Clearly the authors should have thought that some things about Rooms and Cedar Desk Tops were new and those things have to be what are in the patent claims, but it is worth finding people who worked with those earlier systems who could look at the claims. I don't think it is at all clear that the claims do contain anything that were not already in those earlier systems. If nothing else, looking at those earlier systems should help to narrow the claims down to just what was actually new.
One system this reminds me of which is not mentioned there is the Lisp Machines as developed at the MIT AI Lab and then Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI), and by Symbolics. The patent claims all seem to rest on the ida of having linked data structures that represent virtual workspaces that are linked lists of display objects. That is very Lisp-like, and in fact Rooms was a virtual desktop environment implememted in InterLisp. It is quite likely that while people were doing that kind of thing on the West Coast where InterLisp was popular, the MIT people were doing something similar on the LMI and Symbolics Lisp Machines. I would look for people who worked with those environments in the mid-1980s who could say whether it had tools for switching users or virtual workspaces, or even collections of windows that made use of linked lists that pointed to collections of windows that could be made visible as sets.
X Terminal, X Server and X Windows are applications like this. The project from MIT was started at June 1984. There are many information’s abut the project at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
The site:
http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/overview.htm
has a copy of proceedings from the UK 'Alvey workshop' from 1985 on 'Methodology of Window Management'- that was a government organised research project so the same stuff should be available in print.
Section 3:
http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/p003.htm
has a summary of terms including:
'Sharing: mechanisms to enable many-to-many communication, between tasks and display, and input devices and tasks. Issues are: the degree of transparency of this sharing; and arbitration of control between user and tasks.' - although this seems to be about multiple windows being able to share one display.
section 10:
http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/p010.htm
has a list of question including:
'# Should more than one destination space be permitted per windowing system?
# Should many window to viewport mappings be permitted per source?''
which together sound like virtual desktops.
However it should be remembered this was a pretty early time for windowing systems - that report is pointing out that cut-and-paste sounds like a pretty good idea!
Dave
I'm not sure if this would count or not but this is from a brochure on the PERQ computer from ICL dated 1981.
"The special graphics features mean that the screen may be divided into separate areas, or windows, of any size, each of which may be regarded as a virtual screen."
The full brochure can be found here:
http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/sus/perq_pr/p007.htm
To me it sounds very similar to the patent, but never having worked with a PERQ I cannot say for sure. It might be worth a deeper investigation if it shows that ICL was working on that kind of technology years before the patent.
I also found this site of a guy who claims to have one of the PERQs:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/PERQ/
One last thing I found is this list of references that I think would be interesting reading. These are academic papers and abstracts that discuss user interface methodologies and human/computer interaction, and they seem to all predate the patent by several years.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=42191
This company made a GUI with multiple windows and icons that could exist on multiple screens. You switched between screens with keystrokes. This system ran on concurrent CPM and concurent DOS (Digital Research products) back in the early 80's. I used it then. I notice they're still in business, and maybe have some insight.
http://www.onspec.com/