Microsoft has recently been granted a patent for a ”method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments” That they applied for in 2005. This is essentially the page up and page down buttons on about every keyboard…
This got me thinking about other things Microsoft has tried to patent in the past, which includes ”A method, comprising: selecting pixels to be used as an emoticon” (smileys). Microsoft also holds patents on double-clicking buttons and a scrolling mouse wheel, which is also common throughout the computing world.
This just seems ridiculous to me, but it begs the question of who came up with this idea of page up and page down buttons first? The earliest I could find was an IBM keyboard from 1981 with the buttons.
