Posted on 03/01/2012 3:43:42 PM PST by James C. Bennett
Well, c’mon... We don’t have to push -every- truism to the limits. :-)
Did Hewlitt Packard get a piece of Wozniak’s patent? If not, they should have if he was using their office and their resources to develop his invention.
Hmmmm - I see someone who doesn’t get the humor.
Seems like I remember that he did offer it to them and they turned it down.
THe reason I ask is that nearly every engineer, working for a large company, signs an agreement that anything they invent while working theiri belongs to the company. The engineer gets the patent in his name and usually a small stipend. The company gets the rights. I know this because my husband has about 10 patents with 2 different companies (long since expired). His father had about 23.
I always thought it was unfair that the company got all the money and glory (about a billion $$$ for one of them) while my husband got about $100 for each patent and $50 for those he shared. But, he explained that it is fair because they paid him for all the months he spent not inventing anything.
Actually, Thomas Jefferson wrote much of the draft of the Declaration of Independence all by his lonesome. James Madison drafted up the Constitution from his notes from the Constitutional Conventions, along with his previous work helping with Virginia’s Constitution.
Government by definition is not a solo effort, but almost always the best of government is created by those who don’t spend a lot of time in meetings.
“Meetings are where minutes are taken, and hours are lost.” :)
R: My point is that even the supposedly solitary inventors we like to celebrate for their supposed rugged individuality do not work in a vacuum.
Orville/Wilbur would have been nothing without Wilbur/Orville.
Wozniak was brilliant ... but he was nothing without the folks who designed and built the various CPU, RAM, and other logic chips; CRT monitor; etc. that he assembled to build his first computer.
Shoulders of Giants.
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