What about a tabulator?

________________________________ From: Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Friday, October 24, 2008 8:01:26 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [offtopic] Lempel-Ziv Was: Freedom, standards, and file formats

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 09:19:05PM -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

It's true that math is not itself patentable in the US. The way software patents are constructed is by saying: "We claim a computer system (a) consisting of transistors and all the usual computer trappings, which is loaded with software (b), which tranforms the computer into a device for performing computation (c; described in great detail), so that the resulting system a+b+c, is useful for performing task X", and that *is* patentable in the US, the patents usually go on to describe every application that they can think of, as well as the most obvious permutations of a,b, and c.

Would the patent still apply if I used a babbage difference engine, or an optical computer?

My question is really: how specific are they in describing a computer?