Douglas Engelbart, a technologist who conceived the computer mouse and laid out a vision of an Internet decades before others brought those ideas to the mass market, died on Tuesday night. He was 88.
His eldest daughter, Gerda, said by telephone that her father died of was kidney failure.
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The inventor first developed a computer mouse in the 1960s and patented his creation in the 1970s, though the notion of operating a computer with an outside tool was ahead of its time. When Engelbart first created the mouse it was simply a wooden shell covering two metal wheels.
Engelbart’s mouse patent had a 17-year life span and so the technology entered the public domain in 1987, meaning that he couldn’t collect royalties on the mouse when it was most in use.
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