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by dnrvs 2868 days ago
Alternative source with multiple formats including an OCR'd text file: https://archive.org/details/furby-source
2 comments

The patent wrapper containing it was obtained and scanned by Sean Riddle (seanriddle.com).

This is where it came from, in case anyone (including me) was wondering --- there are a handful of articles online claiming it was "leaked", but it doesn't appear to be so.

It is probably not coincidental that this marks the 20-year expiry of that patent.

Patents can have very interesting things in them, including source code. I can't find the reference now but I remember reading that a famous early calculator (TI? HP?) was reverse-engineered and emulated down to the transistor level because of the detailed chip layout and source code from a patent.

I was occasionally Googling the source code out of boredom, and one day this yielded a bannister.org post of Sean claiming he had obtained a scan of the source code from the USPTO.

I proceeded to contact him and he proceeded to scan and publish it in a few days.

Interestingly it is the exact same scan. (you can download from IA in pdf and get the same file that the link points to).