Douglas Engelbart, the visionary electrical engineer who invented the computer mouse decades before the influx of personal computers into homes and workplaces, has died. He was 88.

He died yesterday at his home in Atherton, California, according to SRI International, the research institute founded by Stanford University. The cause was kidney failure, the New York Times reported, citing his wife, Karen O’Leary Engelbart.

Engelbart’s work at SRI, then called the Stanford Research Institute, resulted in 21 patents. The last one, No. 3,541,541, filed in 1967 and granted in 1970, was for the computer mouse.

“Doug’s legacy is immense,” Curtis R. president of SRI, said today in a statement. “Anyone in the world who uses a mouse or enjoys the productive benefits of a personal computer is indebted to him.”

In the patent application, the device was described in technical terms: “An X-Y position indicator control for movement by the hand over any surface to move a cursor over the display on a cathode ray tube, the indicator control generating signals indicating its position to cause a cursor to be displayed on the tube at the corresponding position.”

Palm-Sized

He had devised the palm-sized, wheel-based instrument in 1963 as a way to move a computer-screen cursor by means other than arrows on a keyboard. Other alternatives being weighed at the time were a light-pen pointed at the screen, a tracking ball and a joystick.

“I remember how my head went back to a device called a planimeter,” another wheel-based device used by engineers to measure irregular geometric areas, he recalled in a 1987 oral- history interview with Stanford University Libraries.

His colleague William English, SRI’s chief engineer, led the tinkering and testing of the cursor controller, which was carved from wood and used two perpendicular wheels rather than the roller ball included in subsequent incarnations. English built the first prototype in 1964.

On Dec. 9, 1968, at a computer conference in San Francisco, Engelbart unveiled his team’s work in a presentation that became known in tech circles as “the mother of all demos.” During the 90-minute session, linked to his lab by a homemade modem, Engelbart showed off then-novel feats including interactive computing, video conferencing, windows display and hypertext — plus the rectangular, three-button controller he used to control the cursor on the screen.

Naming Rationale

“I don’t know why we call it a mouse,” he told his audience that day. “Sometimes I apologize. It started that way and we never did change it.”

The rationale for the name, he said in other interviews, was quite simple: the device resembled the rodent, with its cord as a tail. He said nobody on his team could remember who used the term first.

The computer mouse burst into public consciousness in the 1980s after being refined at Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center, debuting with little commercial success as part of the Xerox Star computer in 1981, then finally becoming an integral part of computers sold by Apple Inc. and International Business Machines Corp.