[IP] more on In Silicon Valley, a Man Without a Patent

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Stewart, William C (Bill), RTSCG" <billstewart@att.com>
Date: April 15, 2006 8:43:32 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: RE: [IP] In Silicon Valley, a Man Without a Patent

> Mr. Goodfellow had his light-bulb moment in
> 1982, when he came up with the idea of sending electronic mail
> messages wirelessly to a portable device - like a BlackBerry.
> Only back then, there was no BlackBerry; his vision centered on
pagers.

Back in the early 90s, I was taking the Metroliner from DC
back to New Jersey, and I was sitting across the table from
an older guy who had the smallest laptop I'd ever seen
(5 or 6 pounds, made by IBM for Japan, not sold in the US),
a very small cellphone (remember how big the Motorola flip-phones were?)
and an alphanumeric Skytel pager which was receiving relevance-filtered
emails.
I was reading some cryptography papers I'd gotten from John Gilmore,
and we got to talking about privacy and civil liberties and cool toys,
and my new acquaintance was in fact Dave Farber, whose list I'd been
reading for a while :-)  I can't place the trip precisely for
Prior Art reasons, but he'd helped found the EFF [ I was not a  
founder, just an old Board member djf] so it was at least
1990,
and I don't think the term "cypherpunks" came up,
so it was probably 1991 or 1992.


-------------------------------------
To manage your subscription, go to
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/