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| Newer page: | version 5 | Last edited on Friday, December 19, 2003 8:39:40 am | by JohnMcPherson | |
| Older page: | version 4 | Last edited on Friday, December 19, 2003 1:26:58 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
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-A large, once respected IT consulting company who nowadays seem to dwindle into irrelevance. Apparently they mostly recommend MicrosoftWindows solutions. They earned a huge notoriety with the computing world with their [Submarine Patent | http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/lzw/] on [LZW] compression. __This patent is no longer an issue - it expired on Fri, Jun 20 2003.__
+A large, once respected IT consulting company who nowadays seem to dwindle into irrelevance. Apparently they mostly recommend MicrosoftWindows solutions. They earned a huge notoriety with the computing world with their [Submarine Patent | http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/lzw/] on [LZW] compression. __This patent is no longer an issue - it expired on Fri, Jun 20 2003 (in the United States... other countries may have different patent time limits and/or separately filed patents)
.__
!! The story goes thus..
In 1984, Terry Welch, working at [Unisys], extended the LZ78 algorithm with a few simple ideas to make it simpler and more efficient. Following standard procedures, a patent was filed on this new [Algorithm] dubbed [LZW]. However, [Unisys] didn't have much interest in it as it wasn't of any use to their core business. They assured anyone who asked that they allowed free use of the [Algorithm]. Fatally, none of this was ever formally put in contract.
