A new resource :
http://www.citem.org/Patents/Computers
The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) maintains a giant database
of patents dating back to the early 1800's. Patents issued after 1975
are stored as full text and are searchable. All earlier patents are
available only as TIFF images and can be recovered only by knowing
the patent number or by an arduous search system based on an unobvious
(hence patentable ?) classification system.
The data in these early patents is of immense interest to anyone interested
in early computer history and I took it upon myself to begin indexing
the computer related patents. My index currently holds 880 listings and
many names familiar to the computer history buff can be found; though many
remain to be discovered.
There is a mass of fascinating documents to browse through. I have seen
patents running to almost 1000 pages (check out patent number 3400371
issued exactly 40 years ago today)
The complete index is downloaded as a single HTML page and I use JavaScript
to provide searching, sorting and statistical functions. For those who
cannot, or do not want to, enable Javascript, I will be implementing those
features as PHP code in the near future.
I will also set up a discussion forum so that as you discover interesting
bits you can transmit them on to others. Many patents relate directly to
actual commercial machines (see the one listed above) but rarely name those
machines. It will be useful to know the relationship between patents and
actual systems.
As always your comments, suggestions and help are welcome.
Best regards,
-- HansP
Received on Tue Apr 06 2004 - 14:16:27 BST