Word: patentable
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Computers have giant memories, but are exasperatingly literal-minded. The U.S. Patent Office encountered this problem in an acute form when it began planning a computer designed to extract from its memory all earlier mentions of a patent-seeking idea. Patents are described in ordinary English, and ordinary English proved too imprecise for literal-minded computers. The word glass, for instance, means a material and a long list of things made out of that material. It also means additional things (water glasses and eyeglasses made of plastic) that have nothing to do with glass. Such things confuse computers...
...leap this communication barrier, Engineer-Lawyer Simon M. Newman of the Patent Office has been working out a synthetic language called Ruly English that is especially adapted to a computer's huge but simple brain; unlike ordinary, "unruly" English, it gives one and only one meaning to each word...
...civil consent decree was tacit and sympathetic recognition by the Justice Department that dear to RCA is the development of color TV, in which the corporation has invested $130 million to date. In early negotiations RCA's Board Chairman David Sarnoff fought hard to keep complete patent power over his multichrome...
Then RCA President John L. Burns sat in on the negotiations. In what the department considers "a stroke of industrial statesmanship," an agreement was reached on a color TV patent pool...
Dawn's Early Blight. In Naples, a watchmaker applied for a patent on an alarm clock for stubborn sleepers which, if not turned off after the first normal rings, starts an electronic tape featuring the continuous honking of a car horn, the prolonged barking of a dog, several pistol shots followed by a cannon's boom...