Omniweb-l Posting

Dear OmniWeb List Members:

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Please excuse any interruption that this email may cause you. I am
hoping that maybe one of the longstanding NeXT Computer developers on
this list serve could assist me. My client has been sued by Disc Link, a
subsidiary of Acacia Technologies, for patent infringement over the
right to essentially hyperlink (via a pre-programmed "static linkage
reference") out of a CD-ROM deliverable, go over a network to a remote
computer, and return a secondary set of information to the local
computer. I am doing the prior art patent research in an effort to
invalidate this software patent which was filed on July 27, 1994. I
think the NeXT developer community could help defeat this software
patent because the NeXT computer and NeXTSTEP OS were 10 years ahead of
its time.=20

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I am looking for tangible examples of CD-ROMs, most likely burned in the
1986-1994 time period, that evidence some type of pre-programmed, static
linkage reference (e.g., URL, URI, etc.) to a remote computer. I am
thinking of the following types of tangible examples:

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*         A copy of T B-L's original WWW, Nexus, or libwww browser
burned to a CD-ROM on or before July 27, 1994 that would contain
pre-programmed Bookmarks;=20

*         A copy of any other early browsers (e.g., Emacs, NetSurfer,
SpiderWoman, OmniWeb 0.5 <Beta release April 1994>, GOPHER, etc.) burned
to a CD-ROM on or before July 27, 1994 that would contain pre-programmed
Bookmarks;

*         A copy of a dev utilities and freeware CD-ROM called
"Electronic Appwrapper" from Paget Press (1992-1994) for NeXT developers
which may contain one or more of the above referenced browsers;=20

*         Any type of digital user docs, help systems, Conference
Proceedings, etc. that were burned onto a CD-ROM on or before July 27,
1994;

*         Was a newsreader like NewsGrazer native to the NeXTSTEP OS and
would it have contained pre-programmed "Bookmarks" for the user to go to
known news sources in that era; or=20

*         I am open to any other ideas that the NeXT/Apple developer
community may have.

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Collectively, we have to work together to defeat bad software patents.
Thank you for your time and consideration of this request. If you want
to contact me via email <pschreiber> at my @esri.com address or point me
in the right direction that would be fine, or if you wanted to mail me a
copy of CD-ROM that was actually burned in the relevant time period then
I have provided my contact information below. Thanks.

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Pete

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Peter C. Schreiber | Managing Attorney=20

Contracts and Legal Services Department

ESRI | 380 New York Street | Redlands, CA 92373 | USA

Phone: 909-793-2853 ext. 1176 | E-mail: [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> =20

Fax: 909-307-3020 | www.esri.com <http://www.esri.com>=20

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