You will know this already, but newcomers here might not yet, so I will add that
they don't actually NEED a patent for it to be prior art. They just need to have
done it or published a description, just about anywhere will do, so stuff done
before software patents became allowed will also count towards prior art, if
evidence of it can be found. It was not actually SQL, but I may well have some
trivial amounty of prior art myself (there will be MUCH more), because in the
bad old days of the first upgrade of dBase 4, which was still hopelessly buggy
(apparently the first release did not work at all), it would not do what it was
supposed to, so I had to manually program a join, or maybe multiple joins, to
make it work. Very slow of course, and fortunately it was fixed very soon after
Borland bought the product from Ashton-Tate. I must try to find the backup
floppies to see if what I actually did in about 1989 is relevant. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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