Who patented the linked list?

March 19, 2007 by guestauthor in Random with 5 Comments

Something as basic as the standard linked list was patented by Ming-Jen Wang. Can you believe that? It’s time to put on your thinking cap to come up with something "new" to patent. Find out more about the patent on Google Patents.

A computerized list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different sequences. One or more auxiliary pointers enable a fast, sequential traversal of the list with a minimum of computational time. Such lists may be used in any application where lists may be reordered for various purposes.

I plan on starting something new for Mondays. Each Monday, I’m going to spend a little time sifting through the various patents to slap myself on the head asking myself, "why didn’t I think of that?"

http://www.thisfunktional.com Ruddy

Wow, a linked list patented. Seems like anything can be patented nowadays, maybe I should patent the for loop.
chad

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chad

awww snap, comments chewed up the code :(

another programming joke bites the dust ;)
http://www.domesticatedarcades.com GadgetDon

To be fair…it’s not a patent on the linked list. It’s a patent on combining multiple linked lists into single objects. So, for an MP3 collection, each song record might have links to Next song name, prior song name, next artist name, prior artist name, next album name, prior album name, next rating, prior rating, etc. So, while the linked list is certainly not patentable, this isn’t completely insane.

It’s also bad technology. Linked lists have mostly gone the way of the dodo, indexes are better both for searching, for finding (instead of starting at the front and going down, you start in the middle and keep dividing the list in half to find what you need). Also, processors are fast enough and storage is cheap enough that either sorting on the fly or multiple indexes are no big thing.
Jeffy

we JUST learned these!

Who patented the linked list?

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