DEAN HOVEY was hungry. Jobs told him about an amazing computer, code-named Alto, he had just seen at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In early 1980, most computers (including Apple’s) required users to memorize text commands to perform tasks. The Alto had a graphical user interface—a symbolic world with little pictures of folders, documents and other icons—that users navigated with a handheld input device called a mouse. Jobs explained that Apple was working on two computers, named Lisa and Macintosh, that would bring that technology to market. The mouse would help revolutionize computers, making them more accessible to ordinary people. “When I walked out that door,” recalls Hovey, ’78, MS ’85, “I was ready to change the world.”