Hobbyist Wins a Patent for PC's [Hardware design to protect against viruses]

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

> This is a pile of /////




> *******************************
> New York Times
> June 16, 2003
> Hobbyist Wins a Patent for PC's
> 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.
> *******************************


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