USPTO computer patent index

A new resource : http://www.citem.org/Patents/Computers The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) maintains a giant database of patents dating back to the early 1800's. Patents issued after 1975 are stored as full text and are searchable. All earlier patents are available only as TIFF images and can be recovered only by knowing the patent number or by an arduous search system based on an unobvious (hence patentable ?) classification system. The data in these early patents is of immense interest to anyone interested in early computer history and I took it upon myself to begin indexing the computer related patents. My index currently holds 880 listings and many names familiar to the computer history buff can be found; though many remain to be discovered. There is a mass of fascinating documents to browse through. I have seen patents running to almost 1000 pages (check out patent number 3400371 issued exactly 40 years ago today) The complete index is downloaded as a single HTML page and I use JavaScript to provide searching, sorting and statistical functions. For those who cannot, or do not want to, enable Javascript, I will be implementing those features as PHP code in the near future. I will also set up a discussion forum so that as you discover interesting bits you can transmit them on to others. Many patents relate directly to actual commercial machines (see the one listed above) but rarely name those machines. It will be useful to know the relationship between patents and actual systems. As always your comments, suggestions and help are welcome. Best regards, -- HansP