William English, the engineer who developed the modern computer mouse, first demonstrated in 1968, has died at age 91.

It may seem like old history now that the mouse is the de facto input device on desktop PCs, but navigating the first wave of computers was not always easy. Until William English and Douglas Engelbart, better known as Bill, came up with an entirely new invention: the computer mouse.

English worked under Engelbart at SRI International's Augmentation Research Center (ARC), where he was responsible for developing new and innovative ways for people to interact with computers and technology.

The original mouse created by Bill English in the mid-60s was little more than a block of pine wood, some crude buttons, and a connector long buried in history. It contained two potentiometers, parts that could track the movement of two small wheels as the user moved the device. It didn't look like much, but with the computer explosion of the late 1990s, this invention would soon take the world by storm. [The team named it the mouse because the cursor, then called the CAT, appeared to follow the mouse's movements. [The computer mouse was just one of the inventions to come out of the SRI team, which also introduced bitmap displays and hypertext under the banner of the NLS (oN-Line System). These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in San Francisco in 1968.

During this period, both English and Engelbart were also reportedly involved in government-funded psychedelic testing at the nearby International Foundation for Advanced Study.

English would later work at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he would develop the ball mouse following past ventures around the world and help develop machines that would influence both Microsoft's Windows and Apple's Macintosh computers. Becomes.

English is survived by his wife Roberta, two sons Aaron and John, a stepdaughter Patricia, and a granddaughter, the New York Times reported.