On this day in history, as reported by Wired.com, on May 26, 1981, the USPTO granted the first pure software patent, U.S. Patent No. 4,270,182, to Satya Pal Asija. Video games are computer software, so the '182 patent really was a groundbreaker for the industry. The software was a natural-language-interface program called Swift-Answer, an acronym for the contrived name Special Word-Indexed Full-Text Alpha-Numeric Storage With Easy Retrieval.