>>Sorry to "poop in the punchbowl" again, but I've recently been reviewing
>>the rulings in the Xerox v. Palm Computing case wherein Xerox attempted to
>>assert its patent rights in single-stroke character recognition systems.
>
>Do you have a reference to this patent (I wasn't aware of any patent).

The Xerox Unistroke patent is Patent No. 5,596,656, received January, 1997.
The inventor is listed as David Goldberg.  Xerox sued 3Com in April 1997,
and the case was dismissed in June 2000.  The patent was held valid, but
3Com was found non-infringing due to certain technicalities, namely the
occasional use of multiple strokes (for instance, X), and identical strokes
being interpreted differently based on where they're made (ie. letters
versus number areas).  In my non-legal opinion, 3Com won because of
mistakes that Xerox made developing the patent - assuming the patent had no
prior art.

http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05596656__

I'm afraid I can't find the patent that Palm has, though I remember seeing
it - it was apparently acquired from some external developer, back when
they were with 3Com and it was still called US Robotics.  The code was
apparently originally developed and deployed for the Newton.

>Not possible. The current one was derived very directly from the
>original GRAIL recognizer at RAND done by Gabe Groner in 1965 (and
>written up in a RAND report in 1966). Sponsored by ARPA and free to
>all (as it should be). It was the original and truly great single
>stroke recognizer. I have a great movie of it from the late sixties.

I'm sure you're right, but at the moment, the patent is in force.

>Patents are granted willy nilly these days. The patent office long
>ago wimped out on trying to vet patents and have left matters up to
>the courts (a terrible situation that gives rise to an infinity of
>useless and usually meaningless disputes).

Yes, we know :)

>        This is why there are a number of companies in Silicon Valley
>that do nothing but demo prior art on old machines.

I think many people would be happy if this group of patents were invalidated.

(Re: QuikWriting):
>Well, maybe I should try to talk to Ken about all of us being able to
>use it. (I'm personally not a big fan of QuikWriting, but it would be
>fun to have in Squeak.)

It was a very quick hack to write (about two hours) and is somewhat more
reliable than the current recognizer in that it doesn't need to be taught.
Other than that, I would agree that it falls in the "isn't that neat"
category with a number of other Squeak features.  We developed it because
we have some keyboardless tablets and didn't want to teach anything -
besides which the current recognizer needs some "breathing room" that makes
it unsuitable for  filling in little text boxes.

Good luck with Ken - although I think he assigned it to NYU and the last
time I looked, they actively peddled licenses on their site.

-- Duane