Patents

It all began with a client need and relationships and a background of knowledge about the technologies at play...

One day Dan remembers leaving a meeting at the product's corporate development headquarters. Time has passed so details are somewhat foggy, but he believes he was meeting with the client, the field sales engineer, and product management. His client had very specific requirements about proving beyond a reasonable doubt the destruction of stored data beyond recovery - a process known as "wiping" the data.

At a glance it seems like a trivial problem, but when you dig deep it is not. You see, when you "delete" data from any traditional file system, the data still exists on disk until either the disk itself (or disk free space) is "wiped", or until the applicable blocks of disk where the data is stored gets used (written) again. From the file system's persepctive the data is deleted - it doesn't remember how to find that data gain. But from the disk's perspective that data is still there. That is the essence of the problem: in some cases you need to be sure that you're sure that you're sure that the data is immediately (or within some acceptable short span of time) rendered non-recoverable even by low-level disk methods.

Dan knew something about how file systems work underneath the covers. He walked over to the office of one of the chief product engineers, knocked on the door, and had a conversation with him. He thinks they got another engineer on the phone to discuss as well. Together they wrestled with the idea, the client need, and the realities of what they had to work with now - and coming/planned changes to that reality in the future.

Walking out of this brilliant engineer's office Dan didn't know if this would actually happen. A few more discussions probably occurred, and after Dan had moved into an entirely different role he actually kind of forgot about it. 

One day - several years into a completely different role - Dan learned that the methods they had discussed in that office had been honed in and refined and written up into a patentable technology idea. 

Wow!!! What a joy to hear!

Some calls with the team and with attorneys happened, and a few years (in 2018) later the patent application had been approved.

So, Dan is a co-inventor on this patent... He takes no credit at all for the brilliance displayed in the final methods or the write-up, really, for people he will tell you are much more brilliant than him did that hard work. (Though Dan will admit that he would certainly have enjoyed being a part of that... he loves ideation and creating new things that are brilliant. It simply was no longer his role as he had left engineering and moved into sales.) 

What Dan can say is that he was a part of the invention of this idea. He was blessed to see a client need, put his mind to work to solve the need using the technology he represented, and take it to the development minds who could say whether we could do it or not. 

Dan's goal had not been to get a patent, but to get a product enhancement. Ending up with a patent was a wonderful surprise!!!

Find that patent here, where Dan is listed as co-inventor under his first name "George":

US 10,146,782 B1:
SECURE ERASURE OF FILES BY A FILESYSTEM (Bono et al.)