Sachs: So one of our first clients as a consulting company was Apple Computer. Dean Hovey, one of the principals of the company, met Steve Jobs through someone, and we actually did a mechanical engineering design of the Apple III computer-- a project for which I did some mechanical design of the reset button, my claim to fame in the field, and probably the last mechanical engineering I ever did.
And then there was a new project. Steve was working on a new secret project, pre-Lisa, pre-Macintosh, and around 1979, I, Dean, and a couple others from Hovey-Kelley were asked to go over to Xerox PARC and take a look at a new computer that Xerox had. We weren't told why, it was just something that Steve was doing something with. So we went over to PARC and saw the Xerox Star.
We got a demonstration of the Star, which had a graphical user interface, a laser printer, and a mouse. The laser printer was so hush-hush that it was kept in another room: they would only show us a printout of it. I always felt that the cooler engineers got to see the laser printer, because that was definitely cool, and I-- being more junior-- was stuck with looking at this... mouse thing.
The story with the mouse thing was, Xerox had done research to find out what the best input system for a computer was-- the best man-machine interface-- and they had looked at joysticks and trackballs and other things. After ten Ph.D.-years of research they had concluded that the mouse was the best input device. However, it couldn't be mass-produced: it was inherently unreliable, it was too expensive, so it was impractical. So it sat-- it languished-- in the lab.
The mouse they had had a mean time between failure of something like one week, at which time it would jam up irreparably, or the little wire fingers would break. It would jam up on the table-- it had a polished ball bearing that would slide on the table. It had a very flimsy cord whose wires would break. But Steve Jobs said "I want a mouse for $10. Xerox says it can't be built for less than $400, but I want a mouse for $10 that will never fail and that can be mass-produced, because it's going to be the primary interface of the computer of the future."
We of course went back to the office and snickered, and thought, "Maybe he hasn't had enough meat in his diet." [Pang laughs] But if he was willing to pay us $25 an hour to do this, we would design a solar-powered toaster for him. So we said, "Sure, Steve." Actually, Dean Hovey was the one who came back one day and said, "I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is, we've got a new project with Apple. The bad news is, I told Steve we'd design him a mouse for ten bucks."
So we set out thinking, we'll design a mass-producible mouse. The end result, a year or more later, was we had a design, filed a patent and were granted a patent, on the electro-mechanical-optical mouse of today, which is still the reference design for PC mice. Somewhere within there is the whole story of how that happened, and what we ended up doing to make the mouse as invisible to people as it is today.