You need to dig deeper, Fred...'DARPA' Deep...

...had DARPA not provided the 'Seed Money' to SRI, who knows if Steve and Woz would have been able to build their unique offering. Trump is clearly starving future entrepreneurs with his idiotic 'policies' in the Sciences.

AI Overview

Yes, DARPA indirectly and directly played a massive role in funding the technology that Xerox used to develop its computer mouse, but DARPA did not fund Xerox itself to invent it.

The history of the computer mouse connects DARPA and Xerox through a chain of innovation:

• The Actual Invention (Funded by DARPA): The computer mouse was not originally invented by Xerox. It was invented in the 1960s by Douglas Engelbart and his team at the Augmentation Research Center within SRI International (then the Stanford Research Institute). Engelbart's work was heavily funded by ARPA (later renamed DARPA) as part of an initiative to find better ways for humans to interact with computers. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
• The Xerox Connection: In the early 1970s, government funding to SRI from DARPA began to decline. Around this time, Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) was formed and hired several key engineers and researchers away from Engelbart’s SRI lab—including Bill English, the engineer who had physically built Engelbart's first mouse prototype. [1, 2]
• Refinement by Xerox: These former SRI researchers brought the concept of the mouse with them to Xerox. At PARC, they heavily refined the design (such as replacing Engelbart's dual wheels with a ball mechanism) and integrated it into the Xerox Alto and the commercial Xerox Star system. While Xerox funded the development of its own specific computer systems and mouse refinements internally, the underlying mouse technology was entirely a product of earlier DARPA-sponsored military R&D