It's not just the technology, it's the employment of it too. In 1993 this was a new way to use lasers, which a decade before were too expensive, delicate and power hungry to use as such.
Put another way, the change can be incremental. Building upon what is. Without this, pretty much all incremental science would lose funding, for the moment you invent, regardless of cost, it'd just be copied.
If you've ever done hardware, even a toy, it's not simple.
Extensive prototypes, testing for drops, hand fit, assembly at the factory, and more.
Devs today can't even conceive of making a 100% stable product to be shipped on floppy and never updated. Reshipping for bugfixes could break a company in the old days.
Now try that with hardware!
And all those tweaks, fixes, tests can be copied in a second without patents.
I think separating software and hardware patent discussions would be better here, because hardware patents are requied.
> In 1993 this was a new way to use lasers, which a decade before were too expensive, delicate and power hungry to use as such.
I think your timescale is slightly off, but I don't know enough about laser history to say definitely. But judging by what I could find, in 1981 Popular Science seems to have run an ad for laser pointer devices, aimed (no pun intended) towards consumers:
> It wasn’t until the 1980s that lasers became small enough, and required so little energy, that they finally became cheap enough to be used in consumer electronics — take this funky laser pointer from the early 1980s, for example. The November 1981 edition of Popular Science features a Lasers Unlimited advertisement for an assortment of laser pointing devices, including a ruby laser ray gun, a visible red laser lightgun, multi-color lasers and laser light shows, all of which were selling for less than $15 (equivalent to about $42 today) - https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/a-dazzling-history-of-th...
So if they became usable but consumers in 1980s, I'm about 99% confident at least one individual used it for playing with their cats.
But since the author of the patent just happened to have spent the time (10 years later) to write the patent, they got it awarded to them.
It's not just the technology, it's the employment of it too. In 1993 this was a new way to use lasers, which a decade before were too expensive, delicate and power hungry to use as such.
Put another way, the change can be incremental. Building upon what is. Without this, pretty much all incremental science would lose funding, for the moment you invent, regardless of cost, it'd just be copied.
If you've ever done hardware, even a toy, it's not simple.
Extensive prototypes, testing for drops, hand fit, assembly at the factory, and more.
Devs today can't even conceive of making a 100% stable product to be shipped on floppy and never updated. Reshipping for bugfixes could break a company in the old days.
Now try that with hardware!
And all those tweaks, fixes, tests can be copied in a second without patents.
I think separating software and hardware patent discussions would be better here, because hardware patents are requied.