[JDEV] Slashdot article on IM Bots patent

[Timothy Carpenter]

As to prior art...any MOM (Message Oriented Middleware) has this defn of a
bot at the core, as users request for data and a process/application looks
up the data and passes it back.

Further, Reuter Monitor had been doing that since the dawn of time - also
1982? - It was written on PDP-8's when they were the latest thing.

People used it to chat all right - at one stage 80% of the worlds Interbank
FOREX was performed over it using split screen pages. The Post Office (of
the UK) was LIVID when they found out! ;-)

It was one of the forerunners of what the internet became. Information
distribution in real time via static and refreshing pages, news, alerts,
home pages, chat and 'chatrooms' (or was that conferencing?). It also was
authenticated (ok, you hard a hardware auth) and permissions controlled
access down to single user to page granularity.

I cannot see how the patent would hold. Anyhow, the Australian Patent Office
allowed someone to patent the wheel a year or so ago...I am not joking!

Tim

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