Microsoft FAT patent falls flat

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Even more ridiculous patents have been justifed by some

Remember a few years ago when somebody claimed to have patented the "pivot technique" of solving the Y2K problem? There was plenty of prior art, some languages such as NOMAD even had it as a built in feature for many years before it was patented, and it was TRIVIAL. It was tantamount to claiming that he's the first person to decide to use an "If" statement in a programming language or use "if-then-else" logic. Any middle school student studying programming understood that if somebody explains a simple business rule, you can implement it with simple code. It was no different from looking at a person's age and using the "pivot" technique to decide it the person was a child or an adult.

But the whole thing made the news in a big way, and some pretty sizable corporations actually agreed to pay royalties since it was cheaper than fighting it.

The FAT system is trivial for anybody who has studied file systems. It's also an obviously limited system for anybody who has made such a study. Anybody who has studied more robust file systems, whether they be on IBM mainframes or Unix or anywhere else knows that you need to keep track of file names and properties and store that information on the disk somewhere, and you need to have pointers to the beginning block, track, cluster, cylinder, or whatever other unit you use to store information. You also need to keep track of other units if a file spans multiple units, keep track of which units are free, and have the ability to reallocate these units as files are created and deleted. A robust system will do far more than this, but FAT does little more than this, and I can't think of anything off the top of my head that FAT does aside from keeping track of where a file is, and keeping track of the chain of clusters and the basic file properties, and of what space is free. So if all file systems do these things, then what is proprietary? It's like saying I came up with the idea of keeping my sofa across from the fireplace with the TV to the left. Yes, MS might have decided on the basic arrangement of this data, but that's a truly trivial task.

They also left out some features that were pretty basic to most computer users of the day, such as allowing for different file formats, fixed and varying length records, the ability for the OS to know where the nth record in a large file resides on disk with true random access, and so forth. DOS required these sorts of things to be done at the application level, or did not allow them to be done at all. They didn't even bother keeping track of file characteristics, but left it up to the users to recognize what sort of file something is by using a naming convention (but even they did not do that with Word until years later) and by putting characters such as "carriage returns" and linefeeds into the data itself. If these most basic features are not even part of the file system, then they can't claim they did very much, and they certainly didn't do anything non-trivial. Nor could they. DOS was designed to fit on a 360k floppy disk with enough room left for the software and data that would be running under it. It was supposed to be trivial.

Posted by: wresnick   Posted on: 10/01/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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