When amazon.com sued Barnes and Noble to enforce their patent on one-click ordering, the attorneys for Barnes and Noble did enough research to determine that I had developed one-click ordering back in 1995 for Hearst Corporation, well before Amazon filed their patent. The lawyers contacted me and asked me to be an expert witness for them. I would get paid a fat hourly rate. They said that, in addition to my personal experience with one-click, I would be the ideal expert: I was teaching computer science at M.I.T. and an internet applications development laboratory course at that, I was personally involved in programming for dynamic and database-backed Web sites as far back as 1993, and I was good at explaining stuff in plain language.

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I was asked "Why didn't you patent this yourself, if you developed it first?" My reply was "It only took me an hour to build; if I went down to the patent office after every hour of programming, I wouldn't get very much done."