Computer mouse inventor, Doug Engelbart dies at 88

Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse and developer of early incarnations of email, word processing programmes and the internet, has died at the age of 88.

He died from acute kidney failure at his California home after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, said one of his daughters, Diana Engelbart Mangan. 

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, when mainframe computers took up entire rooms and were fed data on punch cards, Portland, Oregon-born Engelbart was envisioning a world in which people used computers to share ideas about solving problems. 

He said his work was all about “augmenting human intellect”, but it boiled down to making computers user-friendly. One of the biggest advances was the mouse, which he developed in the 1960s and patented in 1970.