Inventor of the mouse, Douglas Engelbart, has died at the age of 88.

Mr. Engelbart was a tech genius who not only came up with the idea of a mouse for a computer, but he had also put forward the concept of the ubiquitous Internet before other inventors and entrepreneurs commercialized it.

According to his daughter, Mr. Engelbart was not well and he died in his sleep, reports said.

Mr Engelbart’s presentation of his visionary ideas in 1968 was labeled the "mother of all demos", for its far-reaching impact on the world of technology. He was successful early in his life.

He introduced the world to the mouse, while presenting before thousands of technical experts in San Francisco. A computer scientist by training and graduate of the Stanford Research Institute, the mouse was publicly debuted as a "X-Y position indicator for a display system." It was cubicle in shape and consisted of two discs that could be rolled.

The patent for the mouse filed by Mr. Engelbart on June 21, 1967 said, "This invention relates to visual display systems, and more particularly, to device for alternating the display at selected locations,” reports ABC News.

Thanks to Mr. Engelbart’s creativity and ingenuity, the mouse would evolve into a universal standard for PCs making word processing, data entry and graphics programmes easier to work with. Despite the invention of touch screen technology and touchpads on laptop PCs, the mouse still enjoys a large following with variations like the optical mouse, the wireless mouse, and the laptop mouse, typically half the size of the one used for laptops.

Mr. Engelbart’s contributions were beyond that of the mouse. He is attributed with conducting the first video conference with one of his colleagues positioned 50 kilometres from him. Video conferences are commonplace today with high-speed broadband and functions well for meetings held in real time with colleagues around the world.

More importantly, Mr. Engelbart developed a theory explaining how various links could couple pages of data by creating text-links, an important part of back linking and hyper linking giving way to SEO technology and improving Web architecture.

Unlike other inventors who received royalties, Mr. Engelbart’s innovations did not translate into the massive wealth generated by Silicon Valley firms. For instance, rather than collecting royalties for the mouse, which was patented by SRI and licensed to Apple. Apple would later unveil the mouse with its first computer after SRI sold a license for $40,000, reports Straits Times.

The commentary behind Mr. Engelbart’s discoveries and inventions is that many successful entrepreneurs, including two heavyweights in the tech industry, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, had reeled in millions of dollars based on ideas and concepts that were in part originally developed by Mr. Engelbart.