SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse and developer of early incarnations of email, word processing programs and the Internet, has died at the age of 88.

The Computer History Museum, where Engelbart had been a fellow since 2005, said he died early Wednesday. The museum in Mountain View, Calif., was notified of the death in an email from his daughter, Christina. The cause of death wasn’t immediately known.

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, when mainframes took up entire rooms and were fed data on punch cards, Engelbart already was envisioning a world in which people used computers to share ideas about solving problems.

He said his work was all about “augmenting human intellect,” but it boiled down to making computers userfriendly. One of the biggest advances was the mouse, which he developed in the 1960s and patented in 1970. At the time, it was a wooden shell covering two metal wheels: an “X-Y position indicator for a display system.”