A small technology company won an eye-popping $625.5 million verdict in a patent infringement case against Apple.

On Friday, a federal jury in Tyler, Texas, found that Apple infringed on three patents held by Mirror Worlds, a company founded by Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter.

Apple is challenging both the verdict and the way the damages were calculated. If the $625.5 million figure is upheld, it would be one of the largest in patent lawsuit history.

The lawsuit, filed in 2008, claimed three Apple software features – the Cover Flow flip function, the Spotlight hard drive search tool, and Time Machine, which backs up data – violate Mirror Worlds patents. The jury agreed, awarding $208.5 million for each of the three infringements.

In 1991, prior to the Internet going mainstream, Gelernter published a book called Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How it Will Happen and What it Will Mean. The tome laid out a vision of the future in which people could access masses of real-time, real-world data via their computers.

A decade later, Gelernter's company launched Scopeware, a cascade of on-screen index cards, each of which contains a unique piece of e-mail, a webpage, or a document. (Think, well, Apple Cover Flow.) The cards are shuffled and updated as cards with new information or documents arrive.

Scopeware is Mirror Worlds' first and only product: "a highly visual system that displays a line of documents and other items dating back (or forward) in time along with the option of searching these items to retrieve and edit them," according to the lawsuit.