technical question

["Chawla, Jay" <jchawla@cooley.com>]

Hi everyone.  

Please excuse my intrusion onto this list, but I think you are the people
who can help me.  I'm trying to 
invalidate a patent that was filed in February 1996 and claims technology
that I think you guys were
doing before that.  

The patent claims (claim 1 in the patent) a group message server, a bunch of
hosts connected to the 
server through the internet, the ability to form groups among the hosts, and
the ability of a host
in a group to send a message to the server, that the server then forwards
out to everyone in the
group.  Furthermore, the group message server must be able to aggregate
messages, i.e. if
the server receives a bunch of messages addressed to a group, it can
concatenate them and
send them out in a single packet.

In order for Netrek or anything else to invalidate the patent, it must do
all of the things described
in the above paragraph.  I think that maintaining state information which is
modified by messages
to the group server from hosts in the group and periodically broadcasting
state information
to the group would probably qualify.

My basic question is: does Netrek do all of this stuff and how can I prove
it?  More specifically,
how can I prove it did this stuff before 1995?  (Source code, design
documents, user documents, etc.)
Is there an archive of such things anywhere?

I briefly corresponded with two members of this list, and they sounded
optimistic but required
more information.  If anyone is interested, the patent at issue is number
5,822,523, which 
can be found for free at either the US patent office search engine
http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html 
or the IBM patent search engine http://www.patents.ibm.com/ibm.html .  I am
trying to find
something that predates the filing date (Feb 1, 1996) by at least a year,
and embodies
everything described in claim 1 (column 28 of the patent), and possibly
other claims.

Thanks for any help you can give me!

Jay Chawla
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