The Hypertext Editing System failed in the marketplace. In 1968 the Hypertext Editing System was demonstrated to staff at two major publishing corporations, who staff felt, however, that the Hypertext Editing System was too complex. The idea of sitting being a computer terminal and authoring and editing was more than the managers at that time were willing to believe. While the Hypertext Editing System failed in the marketplace, it was around long enough for at least one paper to be published that survives until today. A link goes from a point of departure to an entrance point in another, or the same, text area.
Links are optional paths embedded in the text.
The text is repositioned on the screen, so that an entrance-point is always at the upper left corner of the screen, and with as many text lines following it as will fit on the screen. The formatting program permits the user to assign format codes to characters and strings within the text. Admittedly the block structure of the BT patent, and the text area structure of the 1969 paper are different, but not different enough to escape being obvious. So under this combined assault of laches, noninfringement and invalidity, my guess is that British Telecom is going to have a hard time asserting this patent against rich deep-pocketed ISPs who can afford to pay the best law firms to take these types of arguments and available prior art, and make much stronger versions of the above analysis. Join the discussion in the O'Reilly Network Patents Forum .