[ Chawla, Jay writes: ]
> >
> > I am trying to invalidate 2 patents filed on February 1, 1996 that claim
> > functionality that I believe existed in majordomo prior to February 1,
> > 1995. (Anything that does what a patent claims more than 1 year before
> > the filing date of the patent invalidates the patent.)
[...]
> > Does majordomo (and message digests) do these things?
[...]
> > o A group messaging server (GMS) that receives messages addressed to a
> > group and forwards those messages to all group members
Yes.
> > o An ability for someone to create a messaging group by sending a message
> > to the GMS with the name of the new group
Not in versions prior to 1999 (1998?).
> > o An ability for someone to send a message to the GMS specifying a group,
> > and have the GMS add that person to the group
Yes.
> > o An ability for someone to send a message to the GMS specifying a group,
> > and have the GMS delete that person from the group
Yes.
> > o Every group has a name. To send a message to the group, a person sends
> > the message to the GMS with the name of the group
Sort of, actually the message is sent to the "group name" instead of the
"GMS".
> > o The GMS can 'aggregate' messages -- that is, it can take a sequence of
> > messages to a group, glob them together and send the resulting big message
> > to the group
Yes.
> > If majordomo did any (not necessarily all) of these things prior to
> > February 1, 1995, I would *very much* appreciate if you could point me to
> > any source code and other documentation with documented
> > publication/distribution dates prior to February 1995, that could be used
> > to prove it.
> >
> > I am aware of Brent Chapman's 1992 paper in LISA VI, but I need something
> > with more detail that documents the above described functionality from the
> > patents. I am also able to get the source code for Release 1.94.5 from
> > the web, but I believe that that release is too recent to be useful in
> > invalidating the patents.
My copy of Mj 1.93 documents being released on Tue Jan 10
18:33:22 1995. A compressed tar file of 1.93 is available from
ftp://www.greatcircle.com/OLD/majordomo-1.93.tar.Z as are various other
supporting files in that directory. Archives of the various Mj mail
lists are also available from http://www.greatcircle.com/archive/ which
date back to 1992. Let us know how this turns out.
--
Dave Wolfe
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