The Company had applied for a patent on an inventory management system that Jay was the major designer and programmer on in the late '90s. He was not an employee of the Company at the time, having been "laid off" in 1994 (3 months after we married), but was working as a contractor. It's funny - he got more respect as a contractor than he'd ever got as an employee.
Anyway, the patent application process started about the time he got sick. In early 2001, when he was getting treatment at Staten Island, after he lost his sight, I would read the documents to him on the rehab center patio (the only place we could get enough privacy). Then I'd drive the 2.5 hours home, type up his comments and send them to his ex-manager, drive back to SI the next day, and we'd go through the next 30 pages or so. His insights were important because he was the only person who fully understood the system and what was unique about it, and I was amazed that he could still perform so well, given that he had lost so much.
Since then, his manager has been keeping me updated on the progress of the patent. I suspect it's against the Company confidentiality rules, but this patent is a kind of memorial to Jay, and I think she understands that it's important to me.
Her last note made me cry. She wrote: "We still remember Jay fondly, and we still use a lot of his code. His code is complicated, elegant, yet durable. What a combination!"
That is a perfect description of Jay's mind - complicated and elegant. Unfortunately, his brain was not as durable as his code.
In the response to the "Examiner's rejections on the grounds of prior art", she wrote, "We have not seen any prior art that addresses the above problems and provides a total solution in the manner shown by [... name of application deleted]. The solutions to these problems are neither simple nor obvious to anyone with ordinary skill in the art."
Ah. Jay. You were amazing.
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