[1149] in java-interest
Threat to Java, Netscape and Web technology in general?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Pierce)
Fri Aug 25 03:04:58 1995
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 1995 23:13:27 -0700
From: jpierce@chem.UCSD.EDU (John Pierce)
To: java-interest@java.sun.com
The following item was forwarded to me today. Does anybody have any further
information on it? It seems absurd that anyone could try to patent "... any
algorithm which implements dynamic bi-directional communications ..."
-- John W Pierce, Chem & Biochem, UC San Diego
jpierce@ucsd.edu
> ------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
> Subject: EOLAS ACQUIRES COMMERCIAL RIGHTS TO KEY WORLD WIDE WEB PATENT
>
> EOLAS ACQUIRES COMMERCIAL RIGHTS TO KEY WORLD WIDE WEB PATENT
>
> 8/21/95 CHICAGO: Eolas Technologies Inc. announced today that it has
> completed a licensing agreement with the University of California for the
> exclusive rights to a pending patent covering the use of embedded program
> objects, or "applets," within World Wide Web documents.
>
> Also covered is the use of any algorithm which implements dynamic
> bi-directional communications between Web browsers and external applications.
>
> This development will have a major impact on the ability of Internet content
> providers to exploit the expanding interactive capabilities of the Web to
> gain advantage in the highly competitive online market.
>
> Currently, various combinations of embedded applets and software development
> APIs (application development interfaces) are major features of Web browsers
> from Netscape, Spyglass, Microsoft, AOL/Navisoft, NeXT, and Sun Microsystems
> (especially Sun's new Java language. A quote from the current Forbes ASAP
> states "Browsers and servers may come and go, but Sun's breakthrough Java
> language, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT, will be the key to a truly interactive
> Internet..."). Talks have been going on for several months between Eolas
> and several of these companies regarding both the licensing of the
> underlying technology and associated products.
>
> The licensed technology was invented in 1993 by a team led by Eolas CEO, Dr.
> Michael Doyle, a UCSF faculty member and past Director of the university's
> academic computing center. Prior to joining UCSF, Dr. Doyle was Director of
> the Biomedical Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
> He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
> where he was active in the area of scientific informatics and collaborated
> with several members of National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the
> birthplace of Mosaic.
>
> According to Dr. Doyle,"We recognized early on that the Web could be
> expanded beyond the limits of plain vanilla HTML document browsing to become
> an all-encompassing environment for interactive applications. We then
> developed an enhanced version of the recently-announced NCSA Mosaic program
> that added technology which enabled Web documents to contain
> fully-interactive "inline" program objects, called Weblets (by Eolas), which
> one could manipulate in place using the enhanced Mosaic program."
>
> The first Weblet created was an interactive 3D medical visualization
> application which employed a three-tier distributed object architecture over
> the Internet to allow a "farm" of powerful remote computers to generate
> images of internal human anatomy in response to the Mosaic user's
> interactive commands, all from within Mosaic. This allowed a user with
> nothing but a low-end networked workstation and the Eolas browser to
> transparently access supercomputer-level power and interactively look inside
> an MRI scan of the human body which was embedded within a Web page.
>
> The Eolas technology will soon be available for licensing. Information and
> demonstrations are available at the Eolas World Wide Web home page
> (http://www.eolas.com). Further information can be obtained by sending
> email to info@eolas.com.
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