 Zoomracks' author, Paul Heckel (formerly of Xerox PARC), received US Patent #4486857 for ""Display system for the suppression and regeneration of characters in a series of fields in a stored record"", describing the basic on-screen operation of the system.After allegedly attempting to license it for some time, in 1988 he filed a series of lawsuits against Apple, Asymetrix (makers of the HyperCard clone ToolBook), IBM (who used ToolBook) and others, as well as offering licenses to end-users of these products in case their uses infringed.Zoomracks itself seems to have disappeared, even by this point in time, and many commented on the lawsuit as a way to make money off a "dead" product, a theme that is very common today.