On 10/23/14, 9:14 PM, John Allen wrote:
Hi Rick - I believe it was CompuServe (which AOL later bought.) It didn't
really cause any trouble...
Regards, John K1AE
-----Original Message-----
From: time-nuts [mailto:time-nuts-boun...@febo.com] On Behalf Of Richard (Rick)
Karlquist
Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2014 10:31 PM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] If any of your USB devices have stopped working
lately...
This dispute reminds me of another one.
A long long time ago, .gif was the internet standard for encoding photographs.
Far and away the favorite. Then the owner (was it
AOL?) decided to enforce their patent by getting snotty with end users. Almost
overnight, .gif virtually disappeared off the face of the earth, to be replaced by .jpg,
previously an also-ran. The IP holder got their wish "We wish people would stop
free loading on our IP.". Be careful what you wish for as the saying goes. Let's
see if history repeats itself.
Rick
It wasn't GIF, per se (which was promulgated by CompuServe), but the
fact that it is LZW compression, which was patented by Welch and
assigned to Unisys in the mid 80s (so the patent has expired by now)
Other compression schemes by Lempel and Ziv were also patented (earlier).
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