Pang: Maybe we could start with you saying a little bit about your own background and training, and how you got into the business of designing mice.
Sachs: Well, let me start by responding to a comment you made before the tape started, that one of the reasons you were looking into the mouse was that with all the information about the Macintosh, the mouse gets lost and is just sort of there. For those of us involved in the mouse, we actually smile at that, because our objective was to make it seamless and invisible. There's a saying that a service impeccably delivered is nearly invisible, just like a fabulous restaurant where your wine glass is always full and you don't know why. The fact that the mouse was non-obtrusive and natural is the result of a lot of work that even predated the work that we did.
That in a way has been the essence of my career: to make things that are easy to use, make things attractive, make things pleasant. My career has spanned twenty-something year so far. I grew up in New Hampshire, and in 1967 started programming. I was in Hanover, New Hampshire, where Dartmouth College is, and Kemeny and Kurtz were writing BASIC. Kemeny's son was in my class. An NSF grant gave free computer time to all kids in school; so I had unlimited use of a mainframe computer, and a timesharing terminal. I learned to use the computer then, and I was hooked.
There was another computer there, a PDP-9, that various Dartmouth grad students were writing programs for, doing graphical user interfaces that were joystick or pen operated. I was fascinated by those, though I had no idea how they would both change the world and touch my life years later.
I got an undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, and then moved to Stanford because the weather was warmer, and Stanford had a great reputation. I actually didn't know anything about Silicon Valley.
Pang: When would that have been?
Sachs: I moved out here in 1977. The Apple II was announced right around then. I met David Kelley at Stanford, who was the teaching assistant for a smart product design class. He needed some help, because he was going to teach a class on smart product design, and he knew all about mechanical engineering design but not computers, and I knew about computers but not mechanical engineering. So we collaborated, and created this class, which is an ongoing program at Stanford now.
We became fast friends, and when graduation time came a year or two later, we talked about starting a company. He went off and started the company, and I went to Europe for vacation for a few months. I came back, and was one of the founding principals of a company called Hovey-Kelley at the time (now called IDEO).
I guess I'm telling this chronologically because the mouse design was one of the first things I ever did in my career, and so I didn't really have any history when I worked on it: all the history of everything I've ever done that would qualify me to design a mouse today happened later. I had the benefit of inexperience.