The inventor of the computer mouse, Doug Engelbart, has died aged 88.

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.

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 did not make much money from the mouse because its patent ran out in 1987, before the device became widely used.

His interest in how computers could be used to aid human cognition eventually led him to Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and then his own laboratory, the Augmentation Research Center.

He also worked on early incarnations of email, word processing and video teleconferences at a California research institute.

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.

Engelbart had considered other designs for his most famous invention, including a device that could be fixed underneath a table and operated by the knee.

He was said to have been driven by the belief that computers could be used to augment human intellect.

At a now legendary presentation that became known as the “mother of all demos” in San Francisco in 1968, he made the first public demonstration of the mouse.

Engelbart was awarded the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize in 1997 and the National Medal of Technology for “creating the foundations of personal computing” in 2000.

Since 2005, he had been a fellow at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

exxell: So Sad... Meanwhile first to..