More on: Instant Messaging Bot Patent - Prior Art

[Seth Johnson <seth.johnson@RealMeasures.dyndns.org>]

(Forwarded from CYBERIA list)

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 02:18:13 -0700
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@POBOX.COM>
To: CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM

IRC was not the first Instant Messaging type system on the
net, but it was well-known long before The September That
Never Ended (1997). www.irc.org has a number of references
and histories - The current RFCs 2810/2811/2812/2813 are
from April 2000, RFC1459 is from 1993, and Jarkko Oikarinen
wrote the early stuff in 1988.

Andrew Leonard's 1997 book "Bots - the Origin of New
Species"

> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/1888869054/excerpt/002-1885502-5168067

is still at Amazon.  Surprisingly, Peter Wayner's 1995 book
"Agents Unleashed" doesn't refer to IRC in the index, but it
was more focused on higher-level problems rather than
transport media.

I asked Google to find me "irc bot 1993" and the first
references were to www.eggheads.org, the organization
currently maintaining eggdrop,

        "The oldest IRC bot still in active development
(Eggdrop was created in 1993)"

This doesn't mean that it's the first bot written, just that
it's the first bot that was good enough to stick around for
9 years :-)

Wired had an article in 1996 about bots, which either means
that they were the cutting edge of cool, or else that they
had once been the cutting edge of cool but it was now time
to popularize them for the wanabees while the cool early
adopters go find something else to do, like hunting venture
capitalists in VRMLspace.

> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.04/netbots.html

Another obvious place to look for bots is the MUD world -
specifically, I googled for "lambdamoo bots", since ~1990
Lambdamoo is perhaps the most famous of them, due to "A Rape
In Cyberspace", Time Magazine in May 2000 had an article
talking about Cobot, written at AT&T Bell Labs, a bot that
finds interesting people to talk to (since LambdaMoo had
gotten pretty big a long time ago.)

> http://www.time.com/time/digital/magazine/articles/0,4753,45789,00.html

The patent is of course written in patentese, designed to
make claims to intellectual property without explaining it
clearly enough for the reader to reimplement it, so while
there are some hints that it may have features that were
sufficiently novel and non-obvious to somebody who had used
IRC and the Web for more than a year when it was issued, and
while there are features that use different syntax than some
early bots, the basic concept of having an instant messaging
system with general-purpose bots that respond to messages is
not new, and having an instant messaging system with a
server that handles requests for data from or about users is
also not new.

**********************************************************************
For Listserv Instructions, see
http://www.lawlists.net/cyberia
Off-Topic threads:
http://www.lawlists.net/mailman/listinfo/cyberia-ot
Need more help? Send mail to:
Cyberia-L-Request@listserv.aol.com
**********************************************************************