Posts by Don Hopkins

AJAX patent threat to giants under the hammer

Prior art from the 1980's: NeWS

You people who think Microsoft "pioneered" AJAX in the 1990s don't know your history, and obviously haven't been working with computers and user interfaces and networking for very long. Microsoft does not deserve the credit you're giving them for inventing AJAX.

Long before he developed Java, James Gosling developed a window system called "NeWS" (for "Network extensible Window System".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

NeWS was originally called "SunDew", and the first paper he published about it was in Methodology of Window Management: Proceedings of an Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon, UK, April 1985 (Focus on Computer Graphics).

http://www.amazon.com/Methodology-Window-Management-Proceedings-Workshop/dp/3540161163

The name of the article was "SunDew: a distributed and extensible window system".

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=23810.23814

NeWS was just like AJAX, but with PostScript instead of JavaScript for programming, with PostScript instead of DHTML for drawing, and with PostScript instead of XML for representing data.

The many user interface toolkits and distributed applications we developed with NeWS totally predate and invalidate any AJAX patents.

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/101

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/98

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/97

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/93

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/92

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/64

I demonstrated NeWS to the director of Microsoft Research, so of course they knew about it. But I'm sure the would be happy to take all the undeserved credit for inventing AJAX.

-Don