I wonder if there was a rush to patent anything and everything back then. Perhaps like the dotcom rush for domain names, patenting hundreds of random ideas in a similar way to domain squatting.
This is still a common practice, the difference is ordinary people have mostly been cut out between the switch to first-to-file and routine abuse of the patent and trademark system. This is how apple got Samsung's phones forcibly pulled from markets for rounding the corners using the same curves highway engineers had been using for half a century before. Whether or not one believes the patent system is fully corrupted yet, it's undeniably coin operated.
