Re: Gates Patents Flipping a Light Switch

[Barry Margolin]

In article <1084555385.86532@news.queue.to>,
 howard@goldstein-pa.com (Howard Goldstein) wrote:

> On Fri, 14 May 2004 12:43:28 -0400, Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> 
> wrote:
>  :  Now tell me: if there wasn't a patent system, what do you think would 
>  :  have happened to Stac?
> 
> Speaking which what ever did happen to Stac?  In their 1993 patent
> infringement complaint (found dejagooing) they claimed to be a 200 employee
> company with $150M of market cap.  Today it's
> 
> cally:~$ host www.stac.com
> Host not found, try again.
> cally:~$

I did a little googling and discovered that Stac Electronics changed 
their name to Previo.  When you go to www.previo.com you end up at 
www.altiris.com.  Their history page says that they acquired Previo's 
backup and recovery technology in 2002.

As disk space has gotten so cheap, it looks like the market for 
automatic filesystem compression has dried up.  Where compression is 
still useful, it's often performed by applications on a file-by-file 
basis, or incorporated directly into the file format (e.g. MP3 and JPEG).

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***