Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!uw-entropy!dataio!bright
From: bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: ARC wars
Message-ID: <1653@dataio.Data-IO.COM>
Date: 12 Aug 88 19:17:20 GMT
References:  <11792@steinmetz.ge.com> <4936@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <6084@xanth.cs.odu.edu>
Reply-To: bright@Data-IO.COM.Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright)
Organization: Data-IO Corporation; Redmond, WA
Lines: 32

In article <6084@xanth.cs.odu.edu> rlb@cs.odu.edu (Robert Lee Bailey) writes:
>Suppose that SEAs attitude had been prevalent at the turn
>of the century?  Can you imagine the early automobile manufacturers
>suing each other because their competitors product also happened to
>have 4 wheels, an engine, and a steering wheel?

Don't laugh! This happened. All the automobile manufacturers agreed to
pay royalties to this one outfit (I forgot the name), except Henry Ford.
Ford took them to court and beat them.

It also happened in the airplane business. The Wright bros patented the
concept of varying the curvature of the wing to effect lateral control,
and also the concept of linking this and the rudder movement to one
combined control. This basically gave them a hammerlock on the aircraft
industry, and there were many attempts to design an airplane that didn't
infringe (the Wright bros won all those cases). Lawsuits abounded, and
the Wrights lost much popularity about this. This continued until WW1,
when the government forced a patent pool to be created so that war production
wouldn't be stalled by patent fights.

By the way, for those people who are designing new arc formats, here's things
I'd like to see that nobody ever talks about:
	1. If one byte is bad in an ARC file, the rest of the files are
	   not recoverable. Arc files should have the directory at the
	   start, and if a byte is lost in the arc file, only the file that
	   the byte is in is lost.
	2. Arc files should use a fat scheme similar to how DOS stores files
	   on a disk, this is so that files can be deleted or updated without
	   rewriting the entire arc file, which is a major reason why it's
	   slow.

Also, the BBS I run will be converted to using ZOO.