Visionary Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, dies at 88

Douglas Engelbart was 25, just engaged to be married and thinking about his future when he had an epiphany in 1950 that would change the world.

He had a good job working at a government aerospace laboratory in California, but he wanted to do more with his life, something of value that might outlive him. Then he had what might be safely called a complete vision of the information age.

The epiphany spoke to him of technology's potential to expand human intelligence, and from it he spun a career that indeed had lasting impact. It led to inventions that became the basis for the internet and the modern computer. Among them was "the bug".

In later years, it was given a more warmhearted name, evoking a small, furry creature given to scurrying across flat surfaces: the computer mouse.

Engelbart died on Tuesday at 88 at his home in California. His wife, Karen O'Leary Engelbart, said the cause was kidney failure.

When Engelbart entered the field, computers were ungainly room-sized calculating machines. One person would feed them information in stacks of punched cards and then wait hours for a printout of answers.

In his epiphany, he saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of symbols - an image most likely derived from his work on radar consoles after the second world war. The screen would serve as a display for a workstation to organise all the information for a project.