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.

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.

The word “mouse” was much catchier, and that’s what the device was eventually called when it debuted as part of a personal computer station, first sold by the Xerox Corporation on this day ...