Software & UI Patents

On December 23, 1983, Norman Hardy (architect of KeyKOS / GNOSIS) at Tymshare Inc in Cupertino, California filed 'Computer security system' in the United States as the assignor. It was granted as US4584639A on April 22, 1986. This patent fences in Claim 1 'the combination of domains (units of processing) / keys (units of authority) / kernel (the sole institution to resolve authority) / factories (mechanism to generate new domains) / non-sensory keys (authority that can extract information) in a capability-based data processing system,' historically important as a successful patenting example of a capability cage. The three-stage transfer history — 1984-02-06 assigned to Tymshare, 1985-08-01 to McDonnell Douglas Corporation, 1985-12-02 to Key Logic Inc — was traversed. This memo verifies the positioning of the patent as the origin of KeyKOS against six secondary sources: Wikipedia EN KeyKOS / Norman Hardy / Capability-based security articles, Mark S. Miller's Medium tribute 'Norm Hardy's Place in History,' Semantic Scholar's 'Security in KeyKOS' Rajunas/Hardy paper, Justia Patents Search Norman Hardy results, the Confused Deputy paper (Hardy 1988), and Google Patents US4584639A. As the Day 28 / Cage Patents axis SW Open closing memo, it completes the SW Cage three forms together with ep97 Yellin/Gosling type-system cage (confines via information consistency, patenting success) / ep98 Bell-LaPadula policy-model cage (confines the direction of information flow, patenting absence) / this memo Hardy capability cage (confines via physical distribution of authority, patenting success).

Day 28 / Cage Patents axis SW Open memo. In summer 1972, under contract from the United States Air Force Electronic Systems Division (USAF ESD, located at Hanscom Air Force Base), David Elliott Bell (then 27) and Leonard J. LaPadula at MITRE Corporation began the mathematical formalization of multi-level security for military use. In November 1973, it was released as MITRE Technical Report 2547 Volume I 'Secure Computer Systems: Mathematical Foundations,' with DTIC Accession Number AD-770768 and Air Force Report Number ESD-TR-73-278 for permanent archival. The Bell-LaPadula model (BLP) centers on three axioms: (1) Simple Security Property 'no read up' (a high-confidentiality object cannot be read by a low-clearance subject), (2) Star Property 'no write down' (a high-clearance subject cannot write to a low-confidentiality object), and (3) Discretionary Security Property (per-pair access-control matrix). This memo verifies, against five secondary sources — Wikipedia EN Bell-LaPadula model article / DTIC AD-770768 official PDF / Internet Archive file text / Bell's own 2005 ACSAC retrospective paper 'Looking Back at the Bell-La Padula Model' / Springer Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security article — that the BLP model was published as a MITRE TR and a CACM 1976 paper without any reference to related patent numbers. Alongside Day 25 ep89 SW-003 BBN IMP's 'ARPA contract → 57-year continuous publication as Internet STD 39' form, this is the second instance of the 'eligibility wall (c) government-contract publication-mandate form.' On the Cage Patents axis SW, it is positioned as 'an information-theoretic policy model that was not patented (absence pattern),' placed at the center of ep97 Yellin/Gosling type-system cage success (US5740441A) and ep99 Hardy KeyKOS capability cage success (US4584639). The central memo of the SW Cage three forms (type cage success / policy cage absence / capability cage success).

On December 20, 1994, Frank Yellin and James A. Gosling at Sun Microsystems filed 'Bytecode program interpreter apparatus and method with pre-verification of data type restrictions and object initialization' in the United States. It was granted as US5740441A on April 14, 1998. This patent fenced the core of the Java Virtual Machine bytecode verifier, the origin of the 'sandbox by pre-execution type checking' design idea that runs continuously through modern JVM, Android Runtime, WebAssembly validators, and the .NET CLR. Against the six physical Cage forms consolidated by Day 27 (ep70 electron / ep71 charge / ep72 static molecular / ep94 electrical / ep95 dynamic molecular / ep96 container), this patent is positioned as the SW opening note for the logical Cage that 'uses type information itself as the wall of the cage.' Claim 1 verbatim leads 18 dependent claims and fences a four-step formal preprocessing procedure: (B1) maintaining data type snapshots for operand stack and registers, (B2A-D) propagating type information to successor instructions through virtual emulation, and (B3) iterating processing of marked instructions. Original Assignee Sun Microsystems Inc was acquired by Oracle Corporation on January 27, 2010, and the Current Assignee is Oracle America Inc. As the Day 28 Cage Patents axis SW Open opening note, this article excavates (1) reading Claim 1 verbatim as a type cage, (2) the contrast with the 'eligibility wall' forms of Day 25 ep88 SW-002 FORTRAN 1957 / ep89 BBN IMP 1969 / ep90 Smalltalk 1972 / ep91 LISP 1958, (3) Sun's two-tier patent strategy contemporaneous with the Java sandbox (the language itself was free, while only the verifier was patented), and (4) the three-form parallel with ep98 Bell-LaPadula policy-model cage absence and ep99 Hardy KeyKOS capability cage success.

Day 26 SW subseries' sixth memo (Eligibility Wall (a) pre-judicial era × (c) government-contract hybrid form). Verification: 1959-04-08 US DoD Charles Phillips (Director, Data System Research Staff) convened major computer vendors and government agencies at the Pentagon → 1959-06-04 CODASYL (Conference on Data Systems Languages, also Committee on Data Systems Languages) was founded → the Short-Range Committee (6 commercial vendors + 3 government agencies + Wegstein as chair) drafted the spec on top of Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC → 1960-01-08 the executive committee approved it → the Government Printing Office published 'COBOL 60' → 1960-08-17 first compile succeeded on the RCA 501 → 1960-12-06/07 RCA-Univac compatibility demo. Wikipedia EN COBOL / Grace Hopper / FLOW-MATIC, the Yale CS Hopper Story, Britannica Hopper, and gracehoppers.wordpress.com FLOW-MATIC explainer all carry no COBOL-related patent number. 1960 sits 12 years before Gottschalk v. Benson, in the pre-judicial era; the cooperative form of DoD government funding ($200M invested, 225 machines in service) + 6 commercial vendors + 3 government agencies stands as the hybrid of pre-judicial era (a) and government contract (c). Together with Day 25 ep88 SW-002 FORTRAN ((a-1) corporate-lab solo type), today's ep91 SW-009 LISP ((a-2) pure academic-disclosure type), and ep92 SW-008 ALGOL 60 ((a-3) international-committee cooperative type), this is the fourth sub-form.

Day 26 SW subseries' fifth memo (third instance of Eligibility Wall (a) pre-judicial era / international-committee cooperative sub-form). Verification of the ALGOL 60 spec, drafted at the Paris meeting on January 11-16, 1960 by a 13-member international committee: Wikipedia EN ALGOL 60, the dl.acm.org CACM 1960-05 paper (DOI 10.1145/367236.367262), CACM 1963 6(1):1-17 Revised Report (DOI 10.1145/366193.366201), the ACM Turing Award Naur 2005 page, the ACM Turing Award Perlis 1966 page, and Bauer's career profile all carry no patent number. 1960 sits 12 years before Gottschalk v. Benson, in the pre-judicial era; the cooperative-disclosure form across IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) + ACM + GAMM (Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik) supplies the (a-3) international-committee cooperative sub-form within pre-judicial era (a). Together with Day 25 ep88 SW-002 FORTRAN ((a-1) corporate-lab solo type), today's ep91 SW-009 LISP ((a-2) pure academic-disclosure type), and ep93 SW-010 COBOL ((a-4) government-contract hybrid type), this is the third sub-form.

Day 26 SW subseries' fourth note (third instance of Eligibility Wall (a) pre-judicial era). Starting from McCarthy's solo September 1958 MIT AI Memo No. 1, 'An Algebraic Language for the Manipulation of Symbolic Expressions,' the four-year LISP genesis runs through Steve Russell hand-coding eval on the IBM 704 in fall 1958, the April 1960 publication of Communications of the ACM 3(4):184-195 'Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I,' and Tim Hart + Mike Levin's first proper compiler in 1962. Verification: Wikipedia EN Lisp, the dl.acm.org CACM 1960-04 paper (DOI 10.1145/367177.367199), MIT AI Memo No. 1 via Stoyan 1984 ACM Symposium, McCarthy's own 'History of Lisp' PDF (jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf), and the ACM Turing Award Laureate McCarthy 1971 page all carry no LISP-related patent number. Together with Day 25 ep88 SW-002 FORTRAN (pre-judicial era #1) and today's ep92 SW-008 ALGOL 60 (international-committee form, #2) plus ep93 SW-010 COBOL (government-contract hybrid form, #4), this becomes the third instance in the SW subseries' Eligibility Wall (a) pre-judicial era form. Across McCarthy's 30-year career — FP language proposal, situation calculus, circumscription — every contribution was published as a paper with no patent record, and the 'shared academic-community culture' of contemporaries Backus / Hoare / Dijkstra / Knuth / Naur / Perlis underpinned the pure form of pre-judicial era (a). Set alongside today's ep92 ALGOL 60 international-committee form and ep93 COBOL government-contract hybrid form, this gives form (a) a three-sub-form resolution.

Day 25 SW subseries' fifth memo. Verification of Xerox PARC Smalltalk: from Alan Kay's Smalltalk-71 design (1971) → Smalltalk-72 (Dan Ingalls implements the first interpreter in about 700 lines of BASIC for the Data General Nova, October 1972) → April 1973 Xerox Alto port → Smalltalk-76 → November 1981 Smalltalk-80 Version 1 release (Adele Goldberg documents). Wikipedia EN Smalltalk, Wikipedia EN Alan Kay, Britannica Alan Kay, Lemelson-MIT Alan Kay, and ACM Turing Award Alan Kay 2003 page all carry no patent reference. Xerox PARC distributed Smalltalk-80 in 1981 to Tektronix / Hewlett-Packard / Apple Computer / DEC under 'unrestricted redistribution' terms, and made it fully public in the August 1981 ACM Computing Surveys 'Special Issue on Smalltalk.' Unlike the IMP's ARPA-mandated public disclosure, this was a voluntary disclosure under Xerox's own corporate judgment, positioning it as the eligibility wall's corporate-strategy form within the SW subseries.

Day 25 SW subseries' fourth memo. Verification of the IMP project: ARPA awarded a 4-node-network contract to BBN (Bolt, Beranek and Newman) in January 1969; Kahn solo-authored BBN Report 1822 'Specification for the Interconnection of a Host and an IMP' in April 1969; the first IMP was deployed at UCLA's Kleinrock lab on 1969-08-30; the first host-to-host connection was made between UCLA and SRI at 22:30 PST on 1969-10-29. Wikipedia EN Interface Message Processor, Wikipedia EN ARPANET, ACM Turing Award Robert E. Kahn 2004 page, and LivingInternet IMP article all contain no patent reference. Because ARPA government funding made the deliverables a public technical specification, BBN Report 1822 was later confirmed as Internet STD 39 and remains fully published at rfc-editor.org. Together with Day 25 ep88 SW-002 FORTRAN ('pre-judicial era' form), this is Eligibility Wall #3 in the form '(c) public disclosure mandated by government contract.'

Day 25 SW subseries' third note (Eligibility Wall #2). Verification of FORTRAN, with timeline: late-1953 Backus solo proposal, 1954-11 draft spec 'The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System,' 1956-10-15 first reference manual 'The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704,' April 1957 first compiler shipment. Google Patents query (inventor=Backus/assignee=IBM/priority 1953-1960) returns 0 results. ACM Turing Award Backus official page, Wikipedia EN John Backus, and Britannica Backus all contain no patent reference. 1957 predates US software-patent-eligibility case law by 15 years; Gottschalk v. Benson (1972) / Parker v. Flook (1978) / Diamond v. Diehr (1981) / State Street Bank (1998) / Alice Corp v. CLS Bank (2014) are the five later Supreme Court / Federal Circuit decisions that subsequently shaped 'pure-algorithm-invention eligibility.' FORTRAN sits 15 years before this case-law arc. IBM's three-pronged strategy — early manual disclosure (1956-10-15), free customer distribution, and source-code trade secrecy — overlaps with 2026 LLM foundation-model strategies (private weights / public APIs / public papers). Combined with Day 24 SW-005 HyperCard (1987 — eligibility-unsettled era post-Diamond v. Diehr), this completes Eligibility Wall forms #1 and #2 of the SW subseries. Today's ep89 SW-003 BBN IMP (1969 ARPA contract / public spec) and ep90 SW-004 Xerox PARC Smalltalk (1972 corporate lab / 4-licensee public release) round out the four-form lineup, raising resolution on 'eligibility wall' into four sub-forms.

Day 24 SW subseries' third memo. Verifying the patenting status of HyperCard, started by Atkinson alone in 1985 (codename WildCard), augmented with Dan Winkler's HyperTalk scripting language in 1986-87, announced at MacWorld Boston on 1987-08-11, and assigned to Apple under the 'bundle free with every Mac' condition. WebSearch, Wikipedia EN HyperCard page, Wikipedia EN Bill Atkinson page, Apple Wiki Fandom, History of Information, OSnews, and Science Museum Group all carry no HyperCard patent number. The only Atkinson-sole, Apple-assigned patent confirmed is US4622545 (image compression, 1986, treated in today's ep85). HyperCard's core elements (cards, stacks, HyperTalk, buttons, scripts, links) have no record of being claimed. Day 24's SW-001/SW-006/SW-007 (Engelbart Mouse / Atkinson region / Lapson + co-inventor cursor control) succeeded at patenting with **claims that include hardware elements**, while HyperCard, being a **pure-software, OS-application**, likely fell into the late-1980s US software-patent eligibility-unsettled-period wall. Recorded as the SW subseries' first 'Eligibility Wall' form.

Day 24 SW subseries' second memo. The Apple ball-type mouse patent US4464652, filed 1982-07-19, granted 1984-08-07, expired, pulled from patentimages.storage.googleapis.com PDF (14 pages, 1.08 MB). The first inventor field reads 'William F. Lapson, Cupertino,' but the second-inventor field is OCR-garbled in pdftotext -raw output as 'g-lfykihsm L°S Gatos' — the actual name not identifiable from the PDF. WebSearch returns 'William D. Atkinson' as co-inventor, but Wikipedia EN's Bill Atkinson page makes no reference to US4464652, and secondary sources (uspto.report, etc.) are blocked by Cloudflare so cross-check is unreachable. Claim 1 verbatim is ball-type (rotatable ball + domed portion + cut-outs + X-Y position indicating means + biasing means + lock cap/lock tabs/lock ridges removability mechanism), fundamentally different in detection principle from Engelbart Mouse US3541541's wheel type (position wheels + transducer + flexible conductor). Recorded as the SW subseries' first 'Information Wall — OCR Form.'

Day 24 launches the SW subseries' second note. The subject is the Atkinson image compression and manipulation patent US4622545, filed 1982-09-30 and granted 1986-11-11. (1) Inventor 'William D. Atkinson, Los Gatos, Calif.' — sole, assigned to Apple Computer, Inc., Cupertino, Calif. before the Mac launch. (2) Appl. No. 428,635. Filed Sep. 30, 1982. Granted Nov. 11, 1986. 4 years 1 month from filing to grant. (3) GATT-pre filing, so 17-years-from-grant rule applies — expired 2003-11-11. (4) Claim 1 verbatim has three means: display means (a plurality of selectively enabled display elements) + memory means (storing a plurality of inversion points, each having a coordinate that specifies orthogonal lines forming the boundaries of a contrasting area) + processing means (enabling display elements corresponding to inversion points and generating contrasting areas, with contrast as a function of previously displayed inversion-point coordinates). Per scanline, an ordered list of 'points where color changes' represents arbitrary closed regions. (5) Subsequent claims describe AND/OR/NOT/XOR logic operations between ordered lists of inversion points, and source-bitmap/destination-bitmap region transfer — the conceptual core of QuickDraw RgnHandle. (6) Modern SVG clip-path, HTML5 Canvas Path2D + clip(), iOS UIBezierPath bool ops, polygon-collider hit detection in game engines, and image-processing flood fill all share the problem-statement 'efficiently represent and compute arbitrary closed regions on screen.' Implementation differs (scanline-based vs. path-based), but the lineage is continuous for 40 years. With SW-001 Engelbart Mouse (filed 1967, 'point at a spatial position with the hand') as the input-side origin, this patent forms the display-side origin of the Apple Lisa/Mac GUI patent map.

Day 23 launches a new AI Archaeology subseries: 'Software/UI Patents.' The first subject is the Engelbart mouse patent US3541541, 'X-Y POSITION INDICATOR FOR A DISPLAY SYSTEM,' filed 1967-06-21, granted 1970-11-17, expired 1987-11-17. Pulled from the Google Patents PDF archive at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/7d/13/7e/3fd1de4c37ed12/US3541541.pdf, the front-matter inventor field reads 'Douglas C. Engelbart, Palo Alto, Calif., assignor to Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., a corporation of California' — a single inventor, not Bill English co-invention. Bill English was an SRI Augmentation Research Center implementation engineer who managed the 1968 Mother of All Demos demo run, but the patent's inventor field does not list him. Claim 1 verbatim claims four elements: (1) a housing, (2) first/second position wheels with rotation axes orthogonal and rims protruding from the housing to contact the surface, (3) transducer means generating digital position signals from wheel rotation, (4) flexible conductor means connecting the transducer to the computer while enabling unrestrained movement. Filed June 21, 1967, Ser. No. 647,872. Patented Nov. 17, 1970. 8 Claims total. The 1995 GATT predates this filing, so the 17-years-from-grant rule applies and the patent expired 1987-11-17. Modern mice (optical/laser), trackpads (capacitive), and Vision Pro hand-tracking (LiDAR) differ in detection principle from Engelbart's mechanical wheels, but the upper-layer design intent 'point at a spatial position with the hand → cursor follows' has been continuous for 60 years. SW subseries launch as a change of pace from the 5-day Phase 1 cosmetic streak (Day 18-22).