Pei-Yuan Wei () is a Taiwanese-American businessman who created ViolaWWW, the first popular graphical web browser.

Career

Pei-Yuan Wei was born in

Pingtung County Pingtung County is a county located in southern Taiwan. It has a warm tropical monsoon climate and is known for its agriculture and tourism. Kenting National Park, Taiwan's oldest national park, is located in the county. The county seat is Pi ...

, Taiwan. He graduated from Berkeley High School in 1986. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a member of the student club, the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF). In the 1990s, Wei was a founding employee of Global Network Navigator, one of the first Internet-based businesses. Later he worked for various

Palm OS Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) was a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provi ...

-related businesses. Since 2008, Perry has been living in both Taiwan and the US, and has devoted most of his time to taking care of his ill family member.

Controversy

Pei-Yuan Wei was at the center of a controversy over patents relating to embedded objects in a web browser, which revolves around whether his browser, ViolaWWW, had the capability to launch embedded objects, prior to the date a patent was filed by Michael David Doyle of

Eolas Eolas (, meaning "Knowledge"; bacronym: "Embedded Objects Linked Across Systems") is a United States technology firm formed as a spin-off from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), in order to commercialize UCSF's patents for work ...

, and the University of California. If it did, it would constitute

prior art Prior art (also known as state of the art or background art) is a concept in patent law used to determine the patentability of an invention, in particular whether an invention meets the novelty and the inventive step or non-obviousness criteria ...

, which may invalidate the patent issued to

. If it did not, in addition to major financial penalties against such companies as Microsoft, the way the World Wide Web and the way browsers that surf it work may be forced to change. Eolas' claim was eventually found invalid by a Texas court.

References

External links

Pei's Home Page
(archive.org 2010-10-18)
Viola Home Page "archive is kept for historic reason only."
Living people Internet pioneers Computer programmers American people of Taiwanese descent Berkeley High School (Berkeley, California) alumni American academics of Chinese descent Year of birth missing (living people) {{taiwan-engineer-stub