Software patents are really an aberration crafted by decades of questionable court rulings. As best i recall they started out as production process patents tha

Software patents are really an aberration crafted by decades of questionable court rulings. As best i recall they started out as production process patents that involved computers to monitor and time. Before that, specific instances of code were protected by copyright. And is what allowed Compaq to produce one of the first proper clean room IBM PC clones (because they could defend in court that they had not copied any of the IBM BIOS code), and thus leading to where we sit today.