I can personally vouch for the usefullness of the
USPTO database (directly as www.uspto.gov) in
conducting vintage computer research. In my ongoing
research of the history of handhelds/PDAs, the
government's database helped me sort out and link
together all sorts of people/corporate connections
which at first seemed disjointed.
--- Hans B PUFAL <hansp_at_citem.org> wrote:
> 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 Wed Apr 07 2004 - 01:43:21 BST