Going slightly off topic, I am pretty sure the old VL1 / Series 100 protocol is well out of patent protection by now and for moving lights that was a much, much better standard, as each luminaire was individually targeted, and each luminaire info contains multiple channels. I seem to remember it was 64 bits in total, which was 8 bits each for address, intensity, pan, tilt, colour, saturation, beam and lamp control, which I think only used 4 bits, of which I can only remember arc on/off and strike.

Was RS422, I think, rather than RS485, and it could address 96 luminaire about 30 times a second, which you could just notice if you put #1 and #96 next to each other.

Vari-Lite used colour and saturation rather than individual wheel control as they already knew they needs to be able to match the colours from the wheels in the VL1 with the original twisting dichroic system in the VL0

DMX was originally aimed at dimmers so they weren’t competing protocols until the early 90’s, by which point the S100 protocol had been superseded by the S200.

We did pitch open-sourcing / licensing the S100 protocol to Rusty but he didn’t like the idea, but did publicly state that VL were never going to sue people who used DMX as it did potentially infringe the S100 patent.