>Unfortunately Texas Instruments has a patent on drawing 3-D images
>on a spinning helix. I was royally pissed to discover this in the
>late eighties because I'd prototyped it years earlier using a
>photocopier lens and a CRT after seeing an article in Byte magazine for
>creating a 3-D image using an oscilloscope and a spining mirror.
>The byte article even had 8080 code for generating simple vector
>graphics.

Could you not use the Byte article as an example of "prior art" if
challenged? I have heard of people getting articles printed in obscure
newspapers in places like Iceland so as to have the "prior art" publishing
available, while having the article printed in a place where it was not
likely to be seen by anyone in the trade while they got their item to a
producible point, but no-one else could patent it as it was now published.

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