http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ter-mouse-dies

Doug Engelbart, a visionary who invented the computer mouse and developed other technology that has transformed the way people work, play and communicate, has died. He was 88.

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, where Engelbart had been a fellow since 2005, said on Wednesday that it was notified of the death in an email from his daughter and biographer, Christina.

Back in the 1950s and 60s, when mainframes took up entire rooms and were fed data on punch cards, Engelbart already was envisioning a day when computers would empower people to share ideas and solve problems in ways that seemed unfathomable at the time.

He said his work was all about "augmenting human intellect" – a mission that boiled down to making computers more intuitive to use. One of the biggest advances was the mouse, which he developed in the 1960s and patented in 1970. At the time, it was a wooden shell covering two metal wheels: an "X-Y position indicator for a display system."