I did take a peek at that Image->Table converter posted by bastard, and it is remarkably similar to my own. 'course using GD instead of parsing it yourself is the easy way out. ;-)

The thing that I find most comical is that I actually developed my HTML-izer for the very same reason that bastard did: to get around the restriction on posting images for low ranking monks. I decided that the files were prohibitively too large to actually do it, mind you.

So I definitely think that "parallel evolution" is the appropriate name for it.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure you're actually referring to Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone. There was another phone inventor whose name escapes me at the moment (the letter "Z" keeps occurring to me, though), who was just beaten to the patent office by Graham. Graham had, in fact, paid off the patent clerk to make sure that his phone was the won patented, and the rest is history.