mouse potato
n. A person who spends a great deal of of time in front of a computer.
Etymology
Examples
1996
Log onto the World Wide Web, type in the address www.superbowl.com, and you enter a football fantasyland featuring equal amounts of statistics, hype, commercialism and cutting edge Internet technology.

By combining their considerable resources, the National Football League, NBC and software powerhouse Microsoft have created a Web site that in its unabashed worship of excess rivals the Super Bowl itself.

There's a complete history of the 30- year-old event, memorable plays of the past, and everything you could possibly want to know about the Cowboys and the Steelers.

It's enough to turn a diehard football fan into a mouse potato, planted in front of a PC, beer in lap.
—David Einstein, “Super Bowl's tangled Web,” The San Francisco Chronicle, January 24, 1996
1994 (earliest)
Mouse Potato: The online and interactive-TV generation's answer to the couch potato.
—Gareth Branwyn, “Jargon Watch,” Wired, January 01, 1994
Notes
In an e-mail to the American Dialect Society, Gareth Branwyn notes that the writer Alice Kahn appears to have coined mouse potato in 1993 (a refererence to her as coiner appears in a message to The Well BBS on September 11, 1993).
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