Long comfortable in the academic realm, where his work anticipated the interactivity of the World Wide Web and cloud computing, he tried business. Mirror Worlds (the name came from one of his offbeat books about adapting technology to people instead of the other way around) offered a way to break out of the numberless files and folders that clutter computer desktops and make information hard to find. The product, Scopeware, created a stream of varied documents — word-processing files, e-mail, calendar items and presentations — in a row of icons stretching into the past and future. Users could slide the icons back and forth to view them. George Gilder, the technology analyst, called it “elegant, easy, natural and beautiful,” and predicted, “It will prevail.”

It did not, at least as part of Mirror Worlds. The company marketed its product to businesses and state agencies across the country, but sales never really took off, and the company closed its doors in 2004.

From 2005 on, Apple introduced new versions of its software, and elements of three fundamental new technologies — Spotlight, Cover Flow and Time Machine — looked and behaved more than a little like Professor Gelernter’s brainchildren. Mirror Worlds, now owned by a hedge fund, sued Apple in 2008 in Tyler, Tex., a place with a reputation for friendliness toward infringement claims.

Among the documents obtained from Apple was the e-mail Mr. Jobs sent in 2001 to his lieutenants after seeing an article in The New York Times about Scopeware.

“Please check out this software ASAP,” he wrote. “It may be something for our future, and we may want to secure a license ASAP.”

An Apple executive at the time said in a deposition that “this was the first time I recall having received a specific mail to look at a company or its technology” from Mr. Jobs. Apple subsequently met with Mirror Worlds, but nothing came of the discussions.

Jeanne C. Fromer, a patent law expert at Fordham Law School in New York, called the e-mail from Mr. Jobs “as close as you get to a smoking gun.” Peter J. Toren, a patent litigator, summed up with a single word: “Wow.”