FORUM

I read today that you can now search the full text of U.S. patents right back to the 1790s thanks to Google. This will be a fantastic resource for researching early slots (and many other things). The ability to text search should make the information much more accessible. Unfortunately, it's U.S. only at present, but Google say they hope to extend it to include other countries.

See: http://www.google.com/patents