It was a pleasant surprise to open the mail and read that Donald Knuth, author of the three-volume The Art of Computer Programming, is the recipient of the Inamori Foundation's 1996 Kyoto Prize in the category of Advanced Technology. Considering that a check for $460,000 accompanies his wall plaque, Dr. Knuth is probably more pleased than I.
According to Kazuo Inamori, president of the Inamori Foundation and chairman of Kyocera, Knuth was given Japan's highest private award for his contributions to the betterment of humankind. In addition to The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth (who was featured in an April 1996 DDJ interview) is the creator of the TeX document-preparation system, Metafont font-design system, and LR parser and attribute grammar. TeX has been described as the most important achievement in publishing since Gutenberg's moveable type.
Previous Kyoto Advanced Technology laureates include John McCarthy of artificial-intelligence fame, and George Gray, developer of the liquid-crystal display. Please join me in hearty congratulations to Dr. Knuth.
Sometimes, of course, it doesn't pay to open the mail. Thousands of software houses recently found this out upon receiving a letter from E-Data, which owns a patent (#4,528,643) covering on-demand electronic distribution of software, fonts, images, music, video, news stories, and just about anything else you can think of. In a carrot-and-stick "amnesty" offer, E-Data offered developers and content providers the choice of a "low-cost, sliding-scale" license or a lawsuit.
(E-Data sued 18 companies in August 1995 for unspecified infringement.) After skirmishing in court, IBM and Adobe licensed the patent (which was granted in 1985 and purchased by E-Data in 1995). CompuServe, Ziff-Davis, and other companies are still litigating. E-Data recently was ordered to identify each product or service it contends infringes on the patent, and explain the meaning of unique technical terms.
We get our share of menacing missives, too. On the eve of putting ink to paper last month, we received a letter from attorneys for Syncronys Softcorp, developer of the SoftRAM compression program. The letter, which was standard in its wording, put DDJ "on notice that if there is anything in the article ["Inside SoftRAM 95," by Mark Russinovich, Bryce Cogswell, and Andrew Schulman] that is false, defamatory, misleading, or misuses trade secrets or copyright material" the company would "vigorously protect its rights."
What was surprising about the letter was that we received it before the article went to press. A miffed Syncronys CEO Rainer Poertner told PC Week Online that he was "disturbed that things have been written without calling us," as if it is common for computer magazines to get a company's approval before publishing an article about its products. (Well, maybe it is with some publications, but not here.) In any event, I'm assuming that the letter was an honest attempt to encourage fair play.
Letters like the one we received are apparently becoming commonplace. Television-station managers, for instance, have received menacing letters warning that "you leave yourself and your station exposed to legal action" for broadcasting ads that criticized certain current members of Congress. The letter, which raises the specter of libel suits, has been described by First Amendment expert Floyd Abrams as "preposterous legally."
Interestingly, historians and archivists are pondering how the shift from paper letters to e-mail will affect the archives of tomorrow. "People have a strong connection and reaction to paper," says Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler, who supervises document conservation at the National Archives. "It's everything that is extremely common and everyday, and that makes it a real link to history." Frank Romano, professor of electronic publishing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, concurs: "I've read the letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway. What are we going to have in the future? The e-mail of F. Scott Fitzgerald?"
Admit it. Doesn't seeing the Gutenberg Bible, Magna Carta, or John Lennon's doodling on exhibit at the British Museum give you the flutters? You have to wonder how researchers, archivists, and museum goers a hundred years from now will react to whatever it is they're looking at.
Of course, there are times when you wish all forms of communication-paper or pixels-would simply disappear. If you don't think so, ask the dean of libraries at the University of Kansas, who published a summary of two conferences in the May 9th edition of a university newsletter, stating that he had "returned reinvigorated." Unfortunately, the conferences he was writing about weren't held until May 13-18 and May 18-21. The embarrassed administrator apologized to his staff, explaining that the draft, written and stored on computer prior to his attending the conference, was mistakenly assumed to be the final article. His apologies were sent via e-mail, of course.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief