17 Sep
2012
17 Sep
'12
9:25 a.m.
On Sep 17, 2012, at 11:36 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 16 Sep 2012 at 23:57, Eric Smith wrote:
Does prior art have to be patented? I'm certainly no lawyer, but I
was under the impression that what matters is that it existed before
the invention claimed, thus rendering the invention non-novel and
thus not valid for a patent. Thus, even though no one has patented
the wheel, you can't get a patent on it (though there are those who
have certainly managed to do so by hoodwinking the patent offices).
Is my understanding flawed? I'm certainly willing to believe it is.
- Dave
So my question is, are there any published works
documenting the
TRS-DOS file system on-disk format, especially the use of the HIT
table, other than "TRS-80 Disk and Other Mysteries" by H. C.
Pennington?
I'm sure that if you delved into the mainframe world software (which
may be hard to do), you'd find similar schemes. Hashing for filename
lookup wasn't all that uncommon--after all, it was used in just about
every compiler I ever ran into for symbol table lookup But computer
software patents weren't allowed back then, which makes the claim of
"prior art" hard to make.