"Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, dies aged 88"
- Douglas Engelbart, the man who made point and click possible with his invention of the mouse, has died aged 88.
- When he first demonstrated his invention to a computer conference in San Francisco, California in 1968, it was basically a wooden shell with two metal wheels for registering movement along the X- and Y-axes.
- Ahead of its time, the mouse wasn’t popularized until the release of the Apple Macintosh in 1984.
- Although the “X-Y position indicator for a display system” Engelbart developed with Bill English was awarded a patent in 1970, they never received any royalties for the device. This was because his employer at the time, SRI International, held the patent, which expired in 1987 before the device became ubiquitous.
