If the patent-standards for the 80's and 90's were as awful as today, I'm sure that some CAD company would have locked up the idea of drag-select, and the Macintosh WIMP interface (and hence MacDraw/MacDraft) would have been legally impossible to create.
On a related note, after Blizzard Entertainment was acquired along with Sierra Entertainment in a corporate merger, I got to meet one of the principal developers of some of the old Sierra-style adventure games. One of his first questions was about the Warcraft path-finding algorithm. When I explained how I had written the algorithm (which I invented independently -- never having done any reading on path-finding), he said (more or less) "yeah, Sierra has a patent on that, but we don't enforce it". Incidentally, the algorithm was awful but functional -- it's apparently known as "crash and turn", but was clever in using minimal CPU since it had to run on the limited computers of the day.
The fact that it was possible for Sierra to patent something that a junior programmer like myself (at that time, 3 years of professional experience) could invent from whole cloth shows how weak the patent system is for software engineering.
Well, apropos of nothing, i just wanted to say this was a great article to read, and I hope you won't mind me indulging in a fan-boy moment by saying that the original Warcraft was a formative experience for me, and I spent much of middle school dreaming up and sketching out a game that was almost identical to Starcraft. :)
Glad you enjoyed the game, and thanks for the kind words. It was very exciting to build the game, particularly after the multiplayer code was functional -- we just knew folks were going to like it!
'we decided to allow players to select only four units at a time based on the idea that users would be required to pay attention to their tactical deployments rather than simply gathering a mob and sending them into the fray all at once.'
Damnation! Sometimes I would just build huge mobs for the fun of it, but trying to get them to attack at the same time was a pain.
Great game though, artistically I enjoyed it more than Warcraft II.
Actually, you can; I wrote that feature all the way back in Warcraft 1.
Select a group of units. Press Ctrl+# (where # is 1..4 or maybe 1..9; I can no longer remember) to bind that group of units to that number key. Then press the # key by itself to select that group.
While it is fun to bash on now and assume things were different in the "good ol' days", the conversations around software patents and the complaints from developers in the field about large companies were the same then as they are now; any difference is only attributable to more fervent journalism playing up the battles, as well as the rise of legal play-by-plays of court cases.
For some evidence, back in May 2000 people on Slashdpt were up in arms about Microsoft nigh-unto patenting package management; the conversations were newer (Slashdot was maybe "Web 1.5"), but even back then I had to point out this wasn't really new: take any patent you don't like, start tracing back the references, and you realize IBM or Xerox probably patented the basics back in the 80s.
/agree
If the patent-standards for the 80's and 90's were as awful as today, I'm sure that some CAD company would have locked up the idea of drag-select, and the Macintosh WIMP interface (and hence MacDraw/MacDraft) would have been legally impossible to create.
On a related note, after Blizzard Entertainment was acquired along with Sierra Entertainment in a corporate merger, I got to meet one of the principal developers of some of the old Sierra-style adventure games. One of his first questions was about the Warcraft path-finding algorithm. When I explained how I had written the algorithm (which I invented independently -- never having done any reading on path-finding), he said (more or less) "yeah, Sierra has a patent on that, but we don't enforce it". Incidentally, the algorithm was awful but functional -- it's apparently known as "crash and turn", but was clever in using minimal CPU since it had to run on the limited computers of the day.
The fact that it was possible for Sierra to patent something that a junior programmer like myself (at that time, 3 years of professional experience) could invent from whole cloth shows how weak the patent system is for software engineering.