Doug Engelbart
The brain behind the computer mouse, Doug Engelbart, has died aged 88. Engelbart developed the tool in the 1960s as a wooden shell covering two metal wheels, patenting it long before the mouse's widespread use.
He also worked on early incarnations of email, word processing and video teleconferences at a California research institute, the BBC reports.The state's Computer History Museum was notified of his death by his daughter, Christina, in an email.
Her father had been in poor health and died peacefully on Tuesday night in his sleep, she said.
Doug Engelbart was born on 30 January 1925 in Portland, Oregon, to a radio repairman father and a
housewife mother.
He studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and served as a radar technician during World War II. He then worked at Nasa's predecessor, Naca, as an electrical engineer, but soon left to pursue a doctorate at University of California, Berkeley.
Engelbart's ideas were way ahead of their time in an era when computers took up entire rooms and data was fed into the hulking machines on punch cards.