15914: Craig-NYT Article: Hobbyist Wins a Patent for PC's (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <hoosier@att.net>


Hobbyist Wins a Patent for PC's
June 16, 2003
By SABRA CHARTRAND

LIKE many people, Claude M. Policard has a day job that is
strikingly different from his hobbies. He works for a
banking service company, where he is a technician helping
to maintain check-processing computers. But he devotes his
spare time to music - playing piano and synthesizer, acting
as a disc jockey at parties and building a digital archive
of music on his personal computer.

A few years ago, his work and his hobby converged in a
moment of casual thought. His company had been hit by a
nasty computer virus, and Mr. Policard remembers feeling
glad he did not have to worry about virus-infested e-mail
contaminating his home computer.

"I had two computers at home," Mr. Policard, who is 65 and
lives in Newark, Del., remembered last week. "My sister
used one, and I used one. My personal computer I used only
for my music, so it will never be attacked by a virus.

"Right then it came to my mind," he continued. "I thought,
so why don't I combine the two computers together, but keep
them in one case?"

Mr. Policard, who was born in Jacmel, Haiti, and grew up in
Port-au-Prince, won a patent last week for a two-in-one
desktop computer with its own internal barrier to
Internet-transmitted viruses.

One hazard of Internet access is the constant vulnerability
to viruses that can infect a computer through e-mail. Some
viruses are malicious enough to corrupt everything on a
hard drive and wipe out operating systems. For many, the
first line of defense against viruses is the refusal to
open unexpected or unknown e-mail attachments. But even
that strategy is not foolproof.

So Mr. Policard created a personal computer that runs with
two independent operating systems, two hard drives and two
memory banks. The separate systems isolate personal
computing files from Internet data. A user installs
software programs and creates word-processing or
spreadsheet files on one hard drive, but gains access to
Internet downloads and e-mail on the second.

>From the outside, the computer looks like a conventional
desktop model. It has one keyboard, one monitor and one
mouse. But when it is turned on, the computer automatically
starts up two separate systems. A toggle function allows a
user to move between the master computing system and the
Internet computer system.

Mr. Policard came to the United States in 1970 after
earning a civil engineering degree at the University of
Haiti. Because his real interest was electronics, he also
took a correspondence course in computers to learn I.B.M.
keypunch and basic programming. Once he moved to New York,
he began a career as a computer technician.

In his patent, Mr. Policard describes his invention as
having the "advantages of two systems without having two
desktop computers." His computer has "a case, power supply,
motherboard, disk drive, disk drive interface, monitor,
keyboard and can additionally include mouse, printer and
CD-ROM-like devices."

While both internal computing systems share the hardware,
the Internet computer is in contact only with "components
that cannot be affected by malicious software."

"Let's call it a computer with a virus-trap inside," Mr.
Policard wrote in an early draft of promotional material
for his invention. The Internet computer system can have
conventional antivirus software to detect known viruses.
But because new viruses emerge all the time, Mr. Policard's
system is designed to act as a trap for those viruses the
computer cannot identify.

"The big advantage of the patent is that any new virus will
not pass into the main computer system," Mr. Policard said
last week.

His patent says "toggling between the two systems can be
accomplished by a switch which can be incorporated into the
PC case, or by a third microprocessor using some keyboard
key sequencing to switch between the systems."

The third microprocessor could also "monitor the state of
both operating systems."

"If one crashed because of an application software bug or a
computer virus, it would not affect the other, because the
other system's basic instruction set and stack would still
be intact," he wrote.

Even though the computer runs on separate systems, its
users are able to transfer data between the master computer
and the Internet computer, Mr. Policard said.

He is not the first inventor with the idea that one
computer should have dual systems. But previous patents
cover single systems designed to duplicate data and
processing functions, creating backups so that nothing is
lost in the event of either a system or power failure. Mr.
Policard cites these earlier patents, which were awarded
before the Internet became a direct pipeline into personal
computers for e-mail containing viruses.

Mr. Policard said he wanted to sell or license his
invention.

"I talked to one computer company, but they told me they
won't look at my idea until I have the patent," he said.
Now he has patent No. 6,578,140.


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/16/technology/16PATE.html?ex=1056780388&ei=1&en=8bc34a55b0d62dce
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company