Computer mouse inventor dies

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

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., where Engelbart had been a fellow since 2005, and the Stanford Research Institute, where he used to work, confirmed his death. The cause of death wasn’t immediately known.

Engelbart developed the mouse in the 1960s and patented it in 1970. At the time, it was a wooden shell covering two metal wheels: an X-Y position indicator for a display system.

Associated Press