US 5,819,038 · Granted 1998-10-06

The 1998 Patent That Made Remote Screen-Sharing Meetings Possible

Imagine running software on your laptop while your friend across the country watches your screen in real-time and can draw notes or circles right on top of what you're doing. This patent covers the technology that lets multiple people see the same program running on one computer and annotate it together — basically the ancestor of modern video conferencing and collaborative tools.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a system where one application runs on a single computer, but remote participants can both view the live display window and issue commands to control that program. What's protected here is the method of replicating the display window across multiple computers' screens, and the ability for any participant to annotate (draw, highlight, or mark up) the shared image on their own local display while those annotations get synchronized back to all other participants' screens.

Why it matters

This patent captures the core mechanics of remote collaboration technology at a time when the internet was still primarily text-based. By protecting the idea of synchronized screen-sharing with real-time annotations across computers, NCR established early intellectual property around distributed work tools. The patent became foundational to how remote meetings and collaborative software evolved, though the specific claims predate the massive adoption of cloud-based collaboration platforms by over a decade.

Real-world use

When you join a Zoom meeting and the host shares their screen while you highlight parts of a document or presentation, you're using technology derived from the same core idea this patent protected.

Original USPTO abstract

The invention concerns using multiple computers to hold a conference. Under the invention, an application program can run on a single computer, yet remote participants can issue commands to the program. Remote participants can watch the program operate, because the invention replicates the display window of the running program onto the displays of the remote computers. Any participant can make annotations on the participant's own computer display. The invention copies the annotations to the displays of the other participants.

Patent details

Publication number: US 5,819,038
Filing date: 1997-03-31
Grant date: 1998-10-06
Assignee: Ncr Corporation
Inventor(s): CARLETON; ALLISON A., FITZPATRICK; CATHERINE M., POMMIER; THERESA M., SCHWARTZ; KRISTA S.
CPC class: G06F3/038

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