Microsoft gabs patent on 'Page Up', 'Page Down' function on your keyboard !

You would never have thought that what you do a million times a day at the office every week could be patented by none other than software giant Microsoft.

The company has been granted a patent on 'Page Up' and 'Page Down' keystrokes. Microsoft had applied for the patent in 2005, and was granted it on 19 August, 2008.

The US patent number 7,415,666 describes Page Up and Page down as "a method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed".

Inventors are listed as Timothy Sellers, Heather Grantham and Joshua Dersch, even though Page Up and Page Down keyboard buttons have been around for well over a quarter of a century.

The patent's summary statement reads, "In one implementation, pressing a Page Down or Page Up keyboard key/button allows a user to begin at any starting vertical location within a page, and navigate to that same location on the next or previous page. For example, if a user is viewing a page starting in a viewing area from the middle of that page and ending at the bottom, a Page Down command will cause the next page to be shown in the viewing area starting at the middle of the next page and ending at the bottom of the next page. Similar behavior occurs when there is more than one column of pages being displayed in a row."

Bordering on the incredulous
Microsoft has a lengthy history of applying for patents for inventions that have a number of times found to be based on earlier work done by others, or based on a common self-evident idea. An example is Microsoft's patent on a mouse wheel that can scroll up and down, and on double-clicking buttons

The latest patent has people around the world wondering if the Page up and Page down keys are indeed a Microsoft invention. A number of sites on the internet have already posted pictures and images of keyboards showing the buttons laid out on keyboards, well before Microsoft claims their invention was created.

Microsoft got its 5,000th patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office in March 2006, and is all set to hit the 10,000 mark soon.