seccosiny

People were busy implementing rather than documenting. And as a result, finding cheap clothing stores that provide who did this idea first is very difficult. And all the various people working on time-sharing were talking to each other. So, one guy may have had the idea, but someone else ran off and implemented it. And topping all of that off, at the time, in the 1960s and the 1970s, the patent office didn’t allow the possibility of wholesale designer clothing, and, therefore, nobody bothered, or no one even tried, to patent anything.

That’s right. You were supposed to send the cheap clothes not just a description, but a hardware implementation. Basically the notion of patenting something meant you carried to the office a model of the thing you were building, the thing that you had invented. And this just doesn’t work with software. So they had, for a long time, declared software as an unpatentable thing. Eventually, they decided that there is indeed cheap clothes online, but it was quite a while later. So you just don’t have patents to look at to find out who invented something first.