Douglas Engelbart 1925-2013

Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse and played a key role in the development of text editors, hypertext, windows, and the internet. So far as I know, none of these activities made him fabulously wealthy, though he did achieve belated fame.

His life is another illustration of the principle that great wealth comes not to those who make great inventions, but to those who figure out how to extract rents from those inventions - the Gates and Jobs of the world.

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