NOTEWORTHY DEATH

Computer-mouse inventor, patent holder

SAN FRANCISCO - Doug Engelbart, a visionary who invented the computer mouse and developed other technology that has transformed the way people work, play and communicate, died late Tuesday. He was 88.

His death of acute kidney failure occurred at his home in Atherton, Calif., after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, according to one of his daughters, Diana Engelbart Mangan.

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, when mainframes took up entire rooms and were fed data on punch cards, Engelbart already was envisioning a day when computers would empower people to share ideas and solve problems in ways that seemed unfathomable at the time.

One of the biggest advances was the mouse, which he developed in the 1960s and patented in 1970. At the time,it was a wooden shell covering two metal wheels: an “X-Y position indicator for a display system.”

Engelbart conceived the computer mouse so early in the evolution of computers that he and his colleagues didn’t profit much from it. The mouse patent had a 17-year life span, allowing the technology to pass into the public domain in 1987. That prevented Engelbart from collecting royalties on the mouse when it was in its widest use. At least 1 billion have been sold since the mid-1980s.

Among Engelbart’s other key developments in computing, along with his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute and his own lab, the Augmentation Research Center, was the use of multiple windows.

Engelbart’s lab also helped develop ARPANet, the government research network that led to the Internet.