Woz and the RCA Character-generator Patent 219
doperative writes with this quote from Steve Wozniak:
"A lot of patents are pretty much not worth that much ... In other words, any fifth-grader could come up with the same approach ... And then we find out RCA has a patent on a character generator for any raster-scanned setup .. And they patented it at a time when nobody could have envisioned it really being used or anything ... and they got five bucks for each Apple II, based on this little idea that's not even an idea. Y'know: store the bits, store the bits, then pop in a character on your TV."
Looks patentable to me (Score:5, Informative)
RCA's patent dates to an era (1940s) when just putting an image on a screen was a challenge, and overlaying it with characters was like magic.
They deserved the credit for putting letters on 50s-era TVs just as much as they deserved credit for developing NTSC-II (i.e. color). If you put in years of effort into experimentation, you deserve the reward of a temporary monopoly on your discovery. IMHO.
Re:So uhh (Score:4, Informative)
This, good sir, is the essence of much excellent engineering. The solution, once discovered, is obvious.
Finding the obvious is all the work.
And just an aside, but since titling was probably a nasty bit of work in early television, RCA would have been thinking about how to do this in a much better way than printed cards held up to the camera. RCA was inventing LCDs in 1962. A character generator concept would have been 'obvious' then, and the application to television not far behind in hindsight. Patent 33456458 was issued in 1963, patent 3426344 filed in 1967, somewhat contemporaneous with LCD development. Woz is off-base on this one. Not much, but he is off-base.
Besides, the hope that RCA wasn't exploring television technology in the 60s is a faint hope indeed. Their LCD work was prescient, superceded only by Sharp and their success in making it commercially viable.