At 04/14/96 1457, jim bell may have written:

At 09:08 AM 4/14/96 -0800, Lee Tien wrote:

...

My recollection from law school is that the law was friendly to math patents in the period before the Supreme Court weighed in. There were some PTO denials, which courts reversed (I think the Court of Claims heard these back then). So I think the trend was toward patenting processes even if mathematical until Gottschalk v. Benson

I seem to recall reading that one of the breakthrough "algorithm" patents was from the 1970's, in which a rubber-curing/molding process's cure time was determined by a mathematical formula based on heat, pressure, mold shape, and a number of other variables.

You're referring to Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175, 195 (1981). I have a half-finished article I wrote in 1994 on software algorithm patents, about 32K, available at <http://www.delfinsd.delfin.com/felix/Algorithm_Patents.htm>. It's the good part, the background material minus footnotes. Although it's a bit dated, the description of foundational cases is still accurate.