Legal politics

General purpose, stored program, electronic computers were invented in the 1940s. But they only began to see widespread commercial usage by the mid to late 1950s. In those days, large mainframe manufacturers often “bundled” application programs or “software” together with the hardware. Dominant hardware manufacturers were not particularly interested in letting others obtain exclusive patent rights for independently developed “software”-presumably for fear that such patents might restrict the utility and/or sales of their hardware. Rumor has it that in these early days computer companies used skillful lobbying techniques in the US Patent Office (and elsewhere in Washington, DC) to stifle the granting of patents for “software” inventions. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, few people in the US Patent Office and in the Courts really understood how a computer program or “software” was physically constituted; or how it physically functioned during program execution in conjunction with general purpose computing hardware. Patent lawyers, with detailed technological knowledge and understanding of such things, were also in short supply. The article goes on to trace the development of software patents and the accompanying legislation to the present day (1997)