Dr. Dobb's Journal April 2001
Molly walked into the restaurant office, found her card, and punched in. On her way to the kitchen, she told my cousin Corbett, "You're not looking yourself today, Nancy." I normally work in my own office, but this morning I was camped out in my partner Nancy's office at Summer Jo's Farm, Garden, and Restaurant, while Corbett was sitting at Nancy's desk printing lengthy documents on our HP 8500. He told me he would only be a few minutes, but he had already stretched it out to an hour, with no sign of finishing soon. Nancy had stomped off to the greenhouse in disgust. I looked at the next document as it came out of the printer. Like all the others, it was a patent application.
"Urban planning device code-named Mrs. Howell. Abstract. A powered, tiltable platform, along with the power supply for said platform, along with the structural materials and construction methods comprising said platform, along with all legal, zoning, and other permits and other impertinences necessitated for the deployment of said platform, said platform being capable of sustaining weights and stresses as detailed in one or more appendices hereto attached or subsequently affixed, and said platform in part or in whole comprising an upper surface and a lower surface each conformingly and sealingly abuttable against one another and against terrestrial subsoil and orientable externally thereto. 16 claims. 32 figures."
The application went on in a more expansive tone to say that the device would revolutionize city planning, require cities and towns to rearchitect themselves, save billions of dollars in energy costs yearly, and cause upheaval in many existing industries. I flipped through to the figures and began to get the picture, so to speak. Apparently, the idea was to move all homes to one end of a town or neighborhood, all workplaces for the residents to the other end, and build a huge tiltable platform under it all, tilting it workward in the morning and homeward in the evening, so that everyone could commute by gravity. Perhaps riding scooters. Yeah, I thought, that'll work.
"Wo, this mon be revivin' the forest industry crankin' out all that paper, yeah," said Brooks, our Jamaican dishwasher, punching in. Corbett was running through a lot of Summer Jo's paper. But I had to admit, he really had that patent prose style nailed.
"What's this one?" I asked, lifting another application from the output tray.
"The concept is simple," he said, "but most patents are issued for simple things. It's a text editor with plug-in skins for repurposing the text."
I told him I didn't get it.
"These days, the hot applications all support plug-ins and skins," Corbett told me. "The era of fascist companies imposing their design sense on the public is over. My patent just extends the concept of skins to text."
I said I still didn't get it.
"It's all about style, really. The content remains the same. For example, you key in an algorithm in an algorithm-representation language like Donald Knuth's Mix, invoke a plug-in to put a C skin on it, and it outputs C code."
"That sounds like a compiler to me."
"Nope. It's an entirely different technology."
It was true, the patent application said "employing an entirely different technology from compilation." It didn't specify what technology, but I guess some details have to be left for the implementation.
"People will develop C++ skins, Perl skins, C Hash skins — "
"I think Microsoft wants that to be pronounced 'C Sharp.'"
"Whatever. And for each programming language skin there can be a documentation skin that generates the dox — comments in the code in the appropriate format for that language plus the user's manual, tech reference manual, yadda yadda. What will really make the technology pay off, though, are the marketing skins."
"Marketing skins?" asked chef Phil, who was probably supposed to be cooking something right then but was reading the patent application over my shoulder.
"Sure, it's easy to generate text in a marketing style. Voilà! Automatic press releases for software, generated from the software itself — or rather from the algorithms that generated the software. But the best publicity is free publicity, of course, and I envision plug-ins for book and columnist skins. The Dvorak skin, the Dummies skin..."
I shook my head. "This is pretty far-fetched, Corbett. Have you actually implemented any of this?"
"Just one plug-in," he admitted. "The patent application skin." He gestured at the document in my hand. "What do you think of the output?"
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mike@swaine.com