Article 73490 of comp.sys.amiga.misc: Path: news.PEAK.ORG!engr.orst.edu!reuter.cse.ogi.edu!uwm.edu!news.alpha.net!news.mathworks.com!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!usenet.cis.ufl.edu!usenet.ufl.edu!gnv.ifas.ufl.edu!climatol From: climatol@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu (Bob Johnson -- Engineer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc Subject: Re: Dells position? Message-ID: <1995Apr25.094245.6489@tower> Date: 25 Apr 95 09:42:45 -0500 References: Lines: 28 In article , D.A.Hulse-91@student.lut.ac.uk (D.A.Hulse-91) writes: > Does anybody have a clue how Dell stand in all of this? > Are they just in it for the Commodore name, or are they trying to > manufacture Amigas/Amiga card for PC? > I`ve checked the Dell WWW page but nothing is mentioned. Dell suddenly woke up and realized that Amiga engineering wasn't as incompetent as Commodore marketing. They wanted to buy Commodore's patents, which is why IBM also got involved at the last minute. IBM had a patent licensing agreement with Commodore and realized that the terms of the sale of Commodore's assets didn't guarantee that the buyer had to continue to honor the patent licensing agreement. In other words, Dell could have possibly forced IBM to pay substantially more for the patents than Commodore was charging them. For that matter, Dell may have also licensed the patents and decided it was cheaper to own them (selling the rest of the assets to CEI) than to pay royalties to the new owner. Someone has claimed that the PCI bus uses Commodore patents. That seems worth a little bit of cash. Think of all the neat things the Amiga had ten years ago that the IBM world only got in the last two or three. Like auto-configuring devices. It seems likely that there were patents issued on some of that technology that apply to the current attempts to add decent features to IBM-type systems. -- Bob Article 73527 of comp.sys.amiga.misc: Path: news.PEAK.ORG!engr.orst.edu!reuter.cse.ogi.edu!uwm.edu!news.alpha.net!news.mathworks.com!gatech!newsjunkie.ans.net!news.rmii.com!rainbow.rmii.com!mdaymon From: mdaymon@rainbow.rmii.com (Maxwell Daymon) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc Subject: Patent: Commodore CD-ROM game machine Date: 26 Apr 1995 08:04:26 GMT Organization: Rocky Mountain Internet Inc. Lines: 16 Message-ID: <3nkuqa$q5f@natasha.rmii.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: rainbow.rmii.com Summary: Commodore's patents... X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Commodore has at least one interesting patent: D0356835 It is a design patent for a "CD-ROM video game machine" :-) However, this is the patent I think Dell may have been after: 05276887 "Bus arbitration system for granting bus access to devices following two-wire bus arbitration protocol and devices following three-wire bus arbitration protocol" Make of it what you will. ------------------ Maxwell Daymon mdaymon@rmii.com ------------------