Christie's auction and other computer history events

[Tom Jennings]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, Paul Koning wrote:

> Tom> It's clear to me that many of them would have a stake in 'no
> Tom> prior art' or a defensible 'no knowldge of prior art'...
>
> The former, sure.  The latter, why?  In patents at least, prior art
> matters, whether you have knowledge of it or not.

Reputation. Mauchly, especially, went far out of his way to make
all sorts of convenient-for-him retroactive claims.

I wish I could recall the two big suits, in the 60's/70's.
RemRand, UNIVAC, Honeywell, etc. RemRand (did they own UNIVAC
then?) tried to enforce overly broad patents on the computer
manufacturers; they had previously made a deal with IBM so they
were immume or had paid etc royalties, and they got caught at
that. All not very hackish behavior...