SRI Engelbart won a patent for his mouse in 1970 . . . but he never made a fortune off it. By the time the mouse became commonplace in the late 1980s, his patent's 17-year-life span had expired.

F or an innovation meant to make it easier to use a computer, its name was surprisingly unwieldy: “X-Y position indicator for a display system.” The word “mouse” was much catchier, and ...

Here's the story behind it The first computer mouse was invented in the early 1960s by Douglas Engelbart during his time at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California.