From: bill.sloman@ieee.org   
      
   On 5/02/2026 8:14 pm, Liz Tuddenham wrote:   
   > Bill Sloman  wrote:   
   >   
   > [...]   
   >> When I was working at EMI Central Research in the UK one of my   
   >> colleagues in the medical ultrasound group submitted more patent queries   
   >> in one year - about fifty - than anybody else in the entire research   
   >> labs.   
   >   
   > I seem to remember EMI had a dedicated patents department which made it   
   > easy for anyone in the company to try to patent any idea, however   
   > trivial.  Many other British firms didn't bother unless the idea was a   
   > really outstanding one.   
      
   EMI most certainly had a dedicated patents department. They did filter   
   out the trivial ideas pretty effectively.   
      
   IBM had a similar set-up in the US, as did Bell Labs and RCA   
      
   I got a patent when I was working at Cambridge Instruments, after I'd   
   left EMI.   
      
   They had tame patent lawyers who did the donkey work.   
      
   I worked on a project where Cambridge Instruments had patented the   
   original idea when a graduate student and his supervisor had come up   
   with it around  1966, and stopped paying the annual fee around 1979 when   
   they ran out of money.   
      
   The graduate student - now an entrepreneur with a Ph.D. - had taken over   
   the patent by paying the annual fee out of his own pocket - and was able   
   to extort quite a bit of money out of Cambridge Instrument in consequence.   
      
   It was a pretty useful idea for a while - Motorola used his machine to   
   speed up the development of the 68k processor by about three months. He   
   was a better salesman than engineer - he was forever pestering his   
   engineers to add new bells and whistles to make the machine easier to   
   sell, and cheapskated on the bread-and-butter work that made the machine   
   easier to use and more reliable in operation.   
      
   One of his engineers got sick of this, and went to work for   
   Fairchild-Schlumberger, before getting Schlumberger money to build a   
   cleaned-up version of the machine, which took over the market (such as   
   it was).   
      
   Bill Sloman, Sydney   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)