Pei-Yuan Wei () is a

Taiwanese-American Taiwanese Americans () are Americans who carry full or partial ancestry from Taiwan. This includes American-born citizens who descend from migrants from Taiwan. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, 49% of Taiwanese Americans lived in the state of Califo ...

businessman who created

ViolaWWW ViolaWWW is a discontinued browser, the first to support scripting and stylesheets for the World Wide Web (WWW). It was first released in 1991/1992 for Unix and acted as the recommended browser at CERN, where the WWW was invented, but eventually ...

, the first popular graphical

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

Career

Pei-Yuan Wei was born in Pingtung County,

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

. He graduated from Berkeley High School in 1986. He received his bachelor's degree from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, and was a member of the student club, the

eXperimental Computing Facility Founded in 1986, the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF) is an undergraduate computing-interest organization at University of California, Berkeley. The "Experimental" description was given in contrast to the Open Computing Facility and the Co ...

(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 pro ...

-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 d ...

, and the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Franci ...

. 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