William English, co-creator of the first computer mouse, dies at 91
Computer pioneer William English has died aged 91, his wife Roberta has confirmed.
The engineer, inventor and researcher, co-created the first modern computer mouse in 1963, after his colleague Doug Engelbart, a fellow engineer at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) came up with the idea.
Working under Engelbart in the mid 1960s, William English, known to most as Bill, became the first person to use a mouse when he built the prototype at SRI.
In the 1950s, after leaving his career in the US Navy, Mr English joined SRI to work with Mr Engelbart who wanted to build a computer that anyone could use - a concept that would be the founding bricks for modern day PCs, laptops and tablets.
At the time computers were only used by specialists who would enter and retrieve information through punched cards, typewriters and printouts.
The mouse, which got its name because of the way the cursor called CAT at the time seemed to chase the mouse movement, was a simple pinewood block with a single button and connector.
Underneath the mouse were two rolling wheels at 90-degree angles that would record vertical and sideways movement on the computer.
Mr Engelbart, who died in 2013, aged 88, envisioned a device that could move a cursor across a computer screen and perform tasks by selecting symbols and pictures, Mr English helped his vision become a reality.
English and Engelbart demonstrated their first mouse and experimental multifaceted computer called oNLine System (NLS), in 1968 at an event in San Francisco that became known as 'The Mother of All Demos'.
The Mother of All Demos unveiled early forms of online text editing, video conferencing and hypertext, the links now commonly used to navigate web pages on the internet.
Mr English, who was born in 1929 in Kentucky, studied electrical engineering at university before embarking on a career in the US Navy.