[JDEV] OT: AOL Patents IM (Patent creates IM wrinkle )

[Federico Lucifredi]

Hello Pete,
    By Cambridge I assume you mean MIT, and as usually MIT can lay a (often
well-founded) claim to almost any innovation in a fashion similar to Pavel
Chekov claiming that Boston Creme (among others) was invented in Russia, I
did a bit of searching...

    It looks like the Tech Review did post claims to the matter. The system
is called Zephir (or at least it is today), and it dates back to the Athena
project - official deploy date: 1988.

    Here -> http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/trailing1002.asp is the
article.

    -Federico

I do not want to sound melodramatic, but next week perhaps someone will
patent scrambled eggs and we will be searching for prior art into that....
as if no one had better things to do....grumble grumble  :-(

----- Original Message -----
From: "Pete Chown" <1 at 234.cx>
To: <jdev at jabber.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2002 14:43
Subject: Re: [JDEV] OT: AOL Patents IM (Patent creates IM wrinkle )


> Van Gale wrote:
>
> > As for IRC and VAX phone, yes they're clearly earlier examples of
chatting,
> > but I think it's stretching it to say they had presence.
>
> We had presence in Cambridge in 1990.  Also, in response to the other
> comment, it was network location independent.  For example I could log
> on from a Computer Lab DECstation.  The presence information was then
> available University-wide.  No one had to ask that specific workstation
> for my details.  However, anyone who wanted could see which DECstation I
> was logged in from, what room in the CL I was sitting in, and so on.
>
> Funny, it didn't seem at all profound at the time, but it was years
> ahead of the competition... :-)
>
> --
> Pete
>
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