More on: Instant Messaging Bot Patent - Prior Art

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

(Forwarded from CYBERIA list)

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 18:30:30 -0400
From: "Stephen T. Middlebrook"
<Stephen.Middlebrook@FMS.TREAS.GOV>
To: CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM

>IRC was not the first Instant Messaging type system on the net,

It isn't clear to me exactly what the IM bot patent is
supposed to cover, but I personally used bots that responded
to IM commands way back in the mid 1980s and they were
commonly used in IBM's VM/CMS products at that time and
earlier.

Back in the proto-internet days, when a number of
universities communicated over an RSCS-based network called
BITNET, there was a form of "instant message" generally
refered to as "TELL" (the name of the CMS command to invoke
it.).  You could send a TELL message to another person and
it would traverse the campus or the world in a second or
two.  TELL messages were also routinely used to send
commands to "bots" running on your own mainframe or other
computers connected to the network.  These bots were usually
pieces of software that ran in so-called "disconnected
virtual machines" (DVM).  They would wake up every second or
minute or once a night and process the commands that had
come in by message or email.  LISTSERV was actually
developed in this environment.  In the 1980s, the easiest
way to sign up for a list would be to send a command to the
the proper listserver via TELL.

     TELL LISTSERV AT WUVMD SUBSCRIBE LISTNAME STEVE
MIDDLEBROOK

A few seconds later you'd get a message back from the
Listserve at WUVMD confirming that you'd been signed up.

The IBM VM operating system also made use of the IM/bot
combination to handle certain kinds of maintenance chores. 
To change a login password, you need certain privileges that
would let you modify the VM Directory. Systems people hated
having to do that for users, so IBM provided an optional
program (the name escapes me at the moment) which like
listserv operated as a "bot" in a DVM.  You gave the DVM
privs to modify the VM Directory.  When a user wanted to
change his password, he would send a tell message to the DVM
with his old password and his new password.  The DVM would
verify he had the old password right, and the change the VM
directory to reflect the new password.

Like I said, I haven't reviewed this IM/Bot patent, but
based on the descriptions in the press, there's prior art
going back to the early 80s or better.  It shouldn't be hard
to document this stuff.  In 86 or 87, I wrote a manual on
using BITNET which was used at my school and several others
and which talked about a number of servers that responded to
interactive messages.  And there should be IBM issued
manuals documenting a lot of this stuff too.

stm


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