Its a scavenger hunt! No, its a holy war against evil software patents! I've talked to a few people on xemacs-beta already, but I figured I would send out a general call for help. I was recently contacted by some high-powered intellectual-property lawyers in chicago who wanted to discuss the history of Emacs/W3 (early 1994, late 1993). My first thought of course was that somebody was trying to get a bogus patent and was making sure none of the old browsers had prior art. And my first suspect was Microsoft. It turns out I had it completely backwards. Back in August of 1994 a company called Eolas filed for - and was eventually granted - a patent on what they called 'weblets'. For those old fogies out there, you might remember the huge flamewars about this on www-talk at the time. This basically patented the <embed> tag proposed by dave ragget for HTML+. And they are now suing the pants off of Microsoft for patent infringement. For details, you can check out various articles on google: http://www.google.com/search?q=eolas+patent+web The patent for anyone who wants to see is United States Patent 5,838,906: http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&... So, why do I care? It looks like microsoft's best bet to show prior art and defeat this bozo's patent is Emacs/W3. According to my ChangeLog entries, I implemented the <embed> tag from HTML+ to do inlined video/mpeg, text/plain, and text/html rendering. This included patching mpeg_play at the time to be able to draw in an external window instead of creating/managing its own. It pains me to help microsoft defend itself, but I think software patents are even more evil, and my hatred for this particular patent predates my distaste for microsoft. So, if anybody has a copy of an old distribution of Emacs/W3 from early may of 1994, _PLEASE_ contact me. Due to several hard drive crashes and being a poor student at the time, I don't have tape backups. Also, any email archives of gnu-emacs-sources with announcements of the mpeg support, distributions of Emacs/W3, or emails from/to me about implementation details of this from the lucid emacs mailing lists (I have archives of help-lucid-emacs and bug-lucid-emacs dating back to 1992 courtesy of jamie, but they don't seem to have too many emails relevant to this). The lawyers have a deadling of early september to submit any discovered documents, or they cannot be used ＠ trial. So... please dig around. I've got a meeting with the lawyers tentatively scheduled for thursday - if I could have a copy of w3-0.9.xxx.tar.gz by then, that would be awesome. Thanks everyone, sorry for the spamming! -bp -- Ceterum censeo vi esse delendam