CIC Granted Patent for Side-by-side Pen-based Computer Design

Think of it as the electronic equivalent of a spiral-bound notebook

Communications Intelligence Corporation (Redwood Shores, CA) was recently granted a patent for the design of a two-page, side-by-side pen-based computer reminiscent of the standard spiral notebook. Up to now, most notepad computers — the NCR 3125, Gridpad, Momenta, and so on — have used a single-sheet-of-paper or clipboard as the basic system metaphor. The CIC design, on the other hand, uses a two-page metaphor that opens up like a spiral notebook with two opposing electronic pages. The two pages can be treated as separate screens with separate applications running on each page (e.g. a word processing program might be running on one page as a reference database program runs on the other page), or as an integrated display with windows that can overlap the two pages.

Patent 5,049,862, issued to James Dao, founder of CIC, Jeffrey Dao, son of the founder, David C. Foyt, a researcher, and Kenneth R. Allen, a patent attorney, essentially covers a design for computers for which component technologies are already available.