Dan Bricklin

I find Dan Bricklin's apparent attitude toward software patents infuriating:

http://danbricklin.com/patenting.htm

http://danbricklin.com/patentsandsoftware.htm

On the one hand he acknowledges the benefits of programming in a software-patent-free environment:

"At that time in history, and before, few fundamental programming concepts were patented. We all borrowed from each other. Just a few examples of concepts where patents played no role in those days: word wrapping, cut and paste, the word processing ruler, sorting and compression algorithms, hypertext linking, and compiler techniques."

On the other hand, he seems to have developed an opportunistically pro-software-patent stance since then:

"That said, I also feel that no matter how much you might feel that patents don't work for the software industry, and how much you may take up the torch to change the law, it is the law today and a fact of programming life..."

"Nevertheless, patenting software is encouraged by law, and I find it my duty to the shareholders of the companies I've been working for to take advantage of this protection."

I could only wish that someone like him, with his presumable level of influence would promote the abolition of software patents. Instead, it sounds like he acknowledges that they're bad, but then makes no effort to use his influence against them, and becomes yet another stockpiler in the software-patent arms race. He himself walked through an open door of intellectual freedom, but…

Back in the day, I had a mobile writing rig consisting of a Handspring Visor PDA, the wonderful Stowaway Keyboard (see http://danbricklin.com/log/stowaway.htm), a word processing app called Wordsmith (http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/2182/review-wordsmith-20/), and a modem that plugged into the Visor’s Springboard expansion slot.

It was great! The whole package fit in a couple pockets, you could turn it on and be typing practically instantly, and the modem made it easy to transfer your work (and also let the setup do double duty as an e-mail terminal). You could print from it wirelessly to any printer that had an IrDA (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_Data_Association) port. And the whole thing ran for ages on a couple of AA batteries, which were cheap and universally available when you needed to replace them. The only downside was the Visor’s low-res monochrome display, but for writing that wasn’t too serious a limitation. I still miss that rig.

The AlphaSmart products seemed like an attempt to bundle this kind of cobbled-together DIY rig into a single product with everything included in one box. I never had the chance to use them, but I was disappointed they never seemed to find an audience.

Ah, the good old days when software and hardware came with a reference card.

http://danbricklin.com/history/saiproduct1.htm

They were typically folded with several panels, just the right size to sit in your shirt pocket next to the pen and pocket protector.

I still have a bunch of these cards I used to carry around in my job as an IBM mainframe engineer. So damn useful and concise.

I guess things change too fast these days for there to be a place for reference cards. And the days of fitting an entire CPU instruction set on a single card are sure in the past.

...and the original VisiCalc executable [1], at 27520 bytes, is smaller than the _app icons_ in a modern iOS app bundle!

VisiCalc was, essentially, _the_ killer app of the early PC era.

The march of progress. ;-)

[1] http://www.danbricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm