Pat Sanders, founder and president of HYPACK, Inc., started the company with the purpose of providing hydrographic consulting for companies who were awarded large area hydrographic survey contracts by government agencies. After leaving a position at the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office in Mississippi and completing a two-year graduate business program at Carnegie-Melon University in Pennsylvania, Sanders founded HYPACK, Inc. in Middlefield, Connecticut. Sanders' first computer was a Columbia Data Systems machine with 640 kilobytes of RAM, a 10 megabyte hard drive, and a yellow monochrome monitor, which he used to write programs for processing manually collected hydrographic data. By 1987, he and his colleagues had established an entire suite of software. At the time, most hydrographic survey systems required expensive hardware, so Sanders decided to assemble his own group of programs, termed a hydrographic package. Thus, HYPACK® was offered for sale to the surveying world.