Roy Schestowitz wrote:
[Groklaw's Jadeclaw informs us of this news from Germany,
which he translates for us: As Heise.de reports today, the
German federal patent court declared the FAT-patent DE69429378
as invalid. The court told Microsoft in clear words, this
patent is not an invention and added that prior art also led
to the invalidation of the patent, including, but not limited
to the RockRidge extension, that makes ISO9660-CD-Roms
readable on Unix-systems.] - Heise
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/86102
AFAIK, regarding MS-DOS FAT being based on prior art, I remember
the similarity to the CP/M-80 based hard disk format. 20 years
ago I used the excellent Xerox documentation through their
surplus store, which was liquidating their personal computer
products and parts.
Using their CP/M documentation, I was able to install a 10 MB MFM
hard disk that was configured differently than the OEM one (2
heads and 720 cylinders versus OEM's 4 heads and 360 cylinders).
(I bought it from a bulletin board sysop, it was a spare and he
let it for a very reasonable price. It cost me a fraction of
what the OEM did.) From studying the documentation, I
disassembled the CP/M hard disk formatting program, patched it
and manually edited the hard drive partition table. I also
patched the BIOS from their disassembler listing I had purchased.
Now I had a hard disk with 3 formatted partitions (and each
bootable. I liked Xerox's monitor program, it was so "mainframe"
like. You actually had to specify whether to boot from floppy,
which floppy or hard disk partition. "LE" loaded from "E:",
which was the first hard disk partition. One could examine
memory locations from their monitor, write or receive from a
hardware port or invoke built in VT-52 terminal emulation. Ahh,
those were the days!)
Since I had purchased their generic MS-DOS 2.0, manual had byte
by byte description of the disk format. There were differences
such as the ability to have subdirectories. CP/M had the space
(bytes) in the file allocation table for time/date information,
but it was not implemented.
UNIX had these features already implemented. Based on the
article's description of EU court findings, Microsoft must have
borrowed concepts from UNIX. There is only so much one can do
with a format using hard disk controller commands with PC
non-unique hardware (thanks to the IBM PC and clones).
--
Cheers, Rafael
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/
http://www.hyphenologist.co.uk/killfile/anti_troll_faq.htm
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