> Remember, the actual i4i patent at issue was filed in 1994, and it only matters if there was prior art from before 1994. It might have been novel at the time.
I am aware of the date of the "invention". I was programming on 8- and 16-bit computers in the 1980s and I was using this and similar kinds of formats for non-textual data, simply because it was easier to do this in assembler than writing a parser, paired with the difficulty of finding unused special bytes in binary data to separate meta-information from the data proper.
And I was also talking about non-obviousness, not novelty.
Fair enough. I haven’t seen the invalidation proceedings and am clearly less of an expert than you. So don’t know whether they got it right. Non-obviousness is, erm, non-obvious.
I am aware of the date of the "invention". I was programming on 8- and 16-bit computers in the 1980s and I was using this and similar kinds of formats for non-textual data, simply because it was easier to do this in assembler than writing a parser, paired with the difficulty of finding unused special bytes in binary data to separate meta-information from the data proper.
And I was also talking about non-obviousness, not novelty.