Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 5th Oct 2005 17:30 UTC
The US Patent and Trademark Office has rejected two key Microsoft patent applications relating to its File Allocation Table file system. But Microsoft officials still hold out hope that the company ultimately will succeed in the quest to patent FAT. Open-source vendors are holding their breath.
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The FAT filesystem was first publicly released with QDOS in 1980 by Seattle Computer Products. I'm not sure that you can patent invention 24 years after the fact, particularly if another company invented it, but especially since the term of the patent coverage is long since past.
There have been some minor variations (tweaking the size of counters and such), but it's more or less unchanged since the initial implementation. No, I think it goes without saying that it's not currently patentable.