5 ms·

Wild to me that you can patent a "taskbar".

vidarh 3y ago
Whatever part they patented, if anything of note, would have also been very narrow, given the history of interfaces with iconification of windows/"tasks" going back at least a decade prior to Windows '95. Maybe making them textual or organizing them into a bar? It'd in any case have been trivial to work around given the number of alternatives with prior art.
dkarras 3y ago
If there was no prior art, why not? I know nothing about the origins but whoever invented it, tested it on people and improved over it to make it shippable deserves some protection under laws which all inventions are protected.
- jojobas 3y ago
  A 1980s car dashboard is prior art.
  - dkarras 3y ago
    yeah then my index finger is prior art for computer mouse. it doesn't work that way. if you can't see how the idea of putting a task bar where it is and making it usable in an operating system requires significant invention, don't know what to tell you. sure, today we are looking at all like it is the most obvious thing in the world, but back then it wasn't that obvious.
    - jojobas 3y ago
      More closely, taskbar is a close digital equivalent of bookmarks. 20 people in clean rooms faced with the task of figuring out a way to show all currently running applications in a small area of the screen would have come up with the same thing in 15 minutes. The fact that someone came up with it first shouldn't give him the same patent protection as say the blue LED.
      - dkarras 3y ago
        ok, as suspected you are underestimating the scope of the invention and reducing it to a tiny feature of it. the patent deals with what it is, how it interacts with running and exiting applications, how the user interacts with it, how it can be configured, in what ways it can be configured, even the start menu and a plethora of other things. it is an invention that can be patented and was granted a patent. was not even controversial. you don't need a blue led type breakthrough to patent something. if you can't see how coming up with all of the above from a blank slate and iterating on it until it fits with the system and user expectations to become the most successful UI innovation ever (remember, something that obvious was mysteriously not present on earlier systems, even when they supported multitasking) then again, I don't know what to tell you.
        jojobas 3y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean by not present in earlier systems. Windows 3.1 had minimizing programs' icons in bottom-left corner of the desktop, and so did NextStep, and similar icon space can be traced all the way back to Windows 1.0. Extending that to all running programs and/or dedicating an always-visile area doesn't appear to be as fundamental a you want it to appear. Integrating it into the OS is obviously not meaningful part of the innovation as Windows approach would not apply elsewhere. The essence of it is someone having an idea that all program's icons should be always visible on the screen, the rest is implementation, and ideas shouldn't be patentable. I'm also pretty sure adding a task bar to KDE/Gnome was done not by reading the patent, but rather by implementing this basic idea from scratch. Going back to blue LEDs, it's as if the concept of a blue LED was patented itself, and nobody could do a blue LED with a different kind of semiconductors and doping.
zokier 3y ago
Can you though?
lproven 3y ago
Not in the slightest. There was nothing like it before, and I broke this down, in detail, nearly a decade before I wrote this article. https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft... Just look at the development history to see how hard it was to invent: https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3329 https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3329
- hasty_pudding 3y ago
  A GUI itself was hard to develop Im sure but no one is patenting "gui for an operating system". Can I patent a steering wheel? Its wild. Where does the line start and stop.
  - lproven 3y ago
    They absolutely did patent OS GUI designs, yes. This is why Apple sued Digital Research -- over the GUI to its OS: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-in-the-courtroom-25-years-of-defending-the-crown-jewels/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-in-the-courtro... https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2023-05-13-how-apple-ruined-gem-and-nearly-windows-too.html https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2023-05-13-how-apple-ruined-gem-an... https://www.osnews.com/story/26322/apple-vs-dri-the-iotheri-look-and-feel-lawsuit/ https://www.osnews.com/story/26322/apple-vs-dri-the-iotheri-... Where does it stop? Specific precise implementations. Menu bar at the top of the screen? Too general. Menu bar at the top of the screen and menus are opened by left clicking on the title, after which the menu appears (termed a "pull down menu"): yes, that was Apple IP. So, everyone else changed their designs: * DR moved to drop-down menus instead: they appear on mouseover, without a click. * Commodore moved to a status bar that only becomes a menu bar on a right click in Amiga OS. * Microsoft moved to menu bars inside the window underneath the title bar (although in accordance with Fitt's law, they are much harder to hit. But MS had dedicated keystrokes for this, which the others did not.) MS licensed this design to the Open Group for Motif, and today, most Unix GUIs use it, although now many are moving to hamburger menus. There are also industry standards for this stuff, which software designers are intended to follow and therefore 100% will not get you sued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access This is all documented history. The fact that people today forgot this is a problem, because there are reasons things are the way they are. This stuff makes sense. It got the way it is, not by accident or coincidence or random drift, but because of multi-million dollar lawsuits. GNOME 3 threw out a lot of good design because the designers did not know there was a difference between "stuff that is Microsoft IP" and "stuff that are industry standards". But the GNOME designers didn't know what bits were perfectly safe to use, and which bits infringed on MS patents... so they tried to build something new and different, and took inspiration from phone designs, which were not meant to be driven by a keyboard and pointing device. There are reasons things are how they are. I think that matters. History matters. As Santayana said: « Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. » It's usually misquoted as "those who don't understand history are condemned to repeat it." Which is why David Spencer said of Unix: "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." It is a mystery to me why the FOSS and Unix community react so negatively and hostilely to being reminded of their history... but that is not going to stop me doing it.

Whatever part they patented, if anything of note, would have also been very narrow, given the history of interfaces with iconification of windows/"tasks" going back at least a decade prior to Windows '95. Maybe making them textual or organizing them into a bar? It'd in any case have been trivial to work around given the number of alternatives with prior art.

dkarras 3y ago

If there was no prior art, why not? I know nothing about the origins but whoever invented it, tested it on people and improved over it to make it shippable deserves some protection under laws which all inventions are protected.

jojobas 3y ago
A 1980s car dashboard is prior art.
- dkarras 3y ago
  yeah then my index finger is prior art for computer mouse. it doesn't work that way. if you can't see how the idea of putting a task bar where it is and making it usable in an operating system requires significant invention, don't know what to tell you. sure, today we are looking at all like it is the most obvious thing in the world, but back then it wasn't that obvious.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    More closely, taskbar is a close digital equivalent of bookmarks. 20 people in clean rooms faced with the task of figuring out a way to show all currently running applications in a small area of the screen would have come up with the same thing in 15 minutes. The fact that someone came up with it first shouldn't give him the same patent protection as say the blue LED.
    - dkarras 3y ago
      ok, as suspected you are underestimating the scope of the invention and reducing it to a tiny feature of it. the patent deals with what it is, how it interacts with running and exiting applications, how the user interacts with it, how it can be configured, in what ways it can be configured, even the start menu and a plethora of other things. it is an invention that can be patented and was granted a patent. was not even controversial. you don't need a blue led type breakthrough to patent something. if you can't see how coming up with all of the above from a blank slate and iterating on it until it fits with the system and user expectations to become the most successful UI innovation ever (remember, something that obvious was mysteriously not present on earlier systems, even when they supported multitasking) then again, I don't know what to tell you.
      - jojobas 3y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean by not present in earlier systems. Windows 3.1 had minimizing programs' icons in bottom-left corner of the desktop, and so did NextStep, and similar icon space can be traced all the way back to Windows 1.0. Extending that to all running programs and/or dedicating an always-visile area doesn't appear to be as fundamental a you want it to appear. Integrating it into the OS is obviously not meaningful part of the innovation as Windows approach would not apply elsewhere. The essence of it is someone having an idea that all program's icons should be always visible on the screen, the rest is implementation, and ideas shouldn't be patentable. I'm also pretty sure adding a task bar to KDE/Gnome was done not by reading the patent, but rather by implementing this basic idea from scratch. Going back to blue LEDs, it's as if the concept of a blue LED was patented itself, and nobody could do a blue LED with a different kind of semiconductors and doping.

zokier 3y ago

Can you though?

lproven 3y ago

Not in the slightest. There was nothing like it before, and I broke this down, in detail, nearly a decade before I wrote this article. https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft... Just look at the development history to see how hard it was to invent: https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3329 https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3329

hasty_pudding 3y ago
A GUI itself was hard to develop Im sure but no one is patenting "gui for an operating system". Can I patent a steering wheel? Its wild. Where does the line start and stop.
- lproven 3y ago
  They absolutely did patent OS GUI designs, yes. This is why Apple sued Digital Research -- over the GUI to its OS: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-in-the-courtroom-25-years-of-defending-the-crown-jewels/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-in-the-courtro... https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2023-05-13-how-apple-ruined-gem-and-nearly-windows-too.html https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2023-05-13-how-apple-ruined-gem-an... https://www.osnews.com/story/26322/apple-vs-dri-the-iotheri-look-and-feel-lawsuit/ https://www.osnews.com/story/26322/apple-vs-dri-the-iotheri-... Where does it stop? Specific precise implementations. Menu bar at the top of the screen? Too general. Menu bar at the top of the screen and menus are opened by left clicking on the title, after which the menu appears (termed a "pull down menu"): yes, that was Apple IP. So, everyone else changed their designs: * DR moved to drop-down menus instead: they appear on mouseover, without a click. * Commodore moved to a status bar that only becomes a menu bar on a right click in Amiga OS. * Microsoft moved to menu bars inside the window underneath the title bar (although in accordance with Fitt's law, they are much harder to hit. But MS had dedicated keystrokes for this, which the others did not.) MS licensed this design to the Open Group for Motif, and today, most Unix GUIs use it, although now many are moving to hamburger menus. There are also industry standards for this stuff, which software designers are intended to follow and therefore 100% will not get you sued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access This is all documented history. The fact that people today forgot this is a problem, because there are reasons things are the way they are. This stuff makes sense. It got the way it is, not by accident or coincidence or random drift, but because of multi-million dollar lawsuits. GNOME 3 threw out a lot of good design because the designers did not know there was a difference between "stuff that is Microsoft IP" and "stuff that are industry standards". But the GNOME designers didn't know what bits were perfectly safe to use, and which bits infringed on MS patents... so they tried to build something new and different, and took inspiration from phone designs, which were not meant to be driven by a keyboard and pointing device. There are reasons things are how they are. I think that matters. History matters. As Santayana said: « Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. » It's usually misquoted as "those who don't understand history are condemned to repeat it." Which is why David Spencer said of Unix: "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." It is a mystery to me why the FOSS and Unix community react so negatively and hostilely to being reminded of their history... but that is not going to stop me doing it.