At 05:59 PM 3/31/2009, Bonnie Dalzell wrote: >Here is a table with timelines. It would appear that FA12T patents - >developd in 1980 would be expired. FAT 16 was introduced in 1984 along >with MSDOS 3.0 - again more than 20 years ago. > >Extended partitions were introduced in 1986. Again just 3 years more than >20 years ago. MSDOS 3.3 is Aug of 1987. > >File Allocation Table > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table > >the part of this page in the section "Long file names" suggests to me that >the LFN was available before windows 95 was released. I wonder how close >this patent is to expiration and if M$ went to court to try and wring a >last bit of money out of it and upset the open source community?
Again, those 4 patents are referring to long file names (which first became available with Windows 95) and have been filed between 1992 and 1997, so they are in effect 'til 2012/2017... Ralf ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
