First Microprocessor (was Re: Corrections to trivia)

On Fri, 9 Oct 1998, Sam Ismail wrote: That's the one. So, what was the story with Hyatt? My understanding is that nobody holds a valid patent for the microprocessor. Here's a NY Times article from 1990 when Hyatt attempted to collect royalties based on his 1968 work: http://www.me.utexas.edu/~me179/topics/patents/case6articles/case6article1.… Here's an interview with Ted Hoff, including an analysis of the Hyatt patent: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/silicon%20genesis/tedbody-n… I'm not a lawyer, but it sounds like Hyatt's patent was thrown out on a technicality: << As reported at 52 BNA's PTCJ 209, on May 10, 1996, the Commissioner of the PTO held that the prevailing applicant and prior inventor of an invention for a computer on an integrated circuit chip was properly denied a judgment because he elected to convert his application into a statutory invention registration. Claims in a Gilbert Hyatt patent 4,942,516 for a computer on a chip were declared invalid in an interference proceeding in September, 1995. Gary Boone of Texas Instruments, Inc. provoked an interference with the Hyatt patent by copying claims of the '516 patent into his pending application, which claimed a priority date of July 1971. -- Doug