Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes | The Onion - America's Finest News Source: "Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes

March 25, 1998 | Issue 33?11

REDMOND, WA?In what CEO Bill Gates called 'an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors,' the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.

Enlarge ImageMicrosoft Patents 01

At a press conference beamed live to Microsoft shareholders around the globe, Bill Gates announces the company's patenting of the binary system.

With the patent, Microsoft's rivals are prohibited from manufacturing or selling products containing zeroes and ones?the mathematical building blocks of all computer languages and programs?unless a royalty fee of 10 cents per digit used is paid to the software giant.

'Microsoft has been using the binary system of ones and zeroes ever since its inception in 1975,' Gates told reporters. 'For years, in the interest of the overall health of the computer industry, we permitted the free and unfettered use of our proprietary numeric systems. However, changing marketplace conditions and the increasingly predatory practices of certain competitors now leave us with no choice but to seek compensation for the use of our numerals.'

A number of major Silicon Valley players, including Apple Computer, Netscape and Sun Microsystems, said they will challenge the Microsoft patent as monopolistic and anti-competitive, claiming that the 10-cent-per-digit licensing fee would bankrupt them instantly.

'While, technically, Java is a complex system of algorithms used to create a platform-independent programming environment, it is, at its core, just a string of trillions of ones and zeroes,' said Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, whose company created the Java programming environment used in many Internet applications. 'The licensing fees we'd have to pay Microsoft every day would be approximately 327,000 times the total net worth of this compa"