I would ask Stein as well, see what he knows about those old cgi days. He might be able to tell you he was employing a different framework of CGI 5years before the patent, then again he might tell you a patent inspired his design =D.

Copyright 1995-1998, Lincoln D. Stein. All rights reserved. This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. Address bug reports and comments to: lstein@cshl.org. When sending bug reports, please provide the version of CGI.pm, the version of Perl, the name and version of your Web server, and the name and version of the operating system you are using. If the problem is even remotely browser dependent, please provide information about the affected browers as well.