《名人传记》之乔布斯遗失的访谈10:实现彩色图形界面
日期:2013-06-12 15:48

(单词翻译:单击)

乔布斯遗失的访谈

We were designing the Apple II. And we really had some,

当时我们正在设计Apple II

some much higher ambitions for the Apple II.

我们对它充满了期待


Woz's ambitions were he wanted to add color grahpics.

Woz希望实现彩色图形界面

My ambition was that, it was very clear to me that a bunch of hardware hobbists,

我希望…当时有一大群硬件爱好者,他们自己组装电脑

they could assemble around the computers, or at least take our board, and add the transformers for the power apply, the case, the keyboard, and go get, and etc. You know, go get rest of the stuff.

或者用我们的主板,自己安装电源、键盘等等

For everyone of those, there were a thousand of people, they couldn't do that but wanted to mess around with programming, software hobbists,

还有许多人是软件爱好者,他们只想写程序

just like I had been, you know, when I was 10, discovering my computer.

就像我10岁刚刚接触计算机那样

And so my dream for the Apple II was to sell the first real packaged computer, packaged personal computer.

所以我希望Apple II成为第一款功能齐备的个人电脑

You didn't have to be a hardware hobbist at all.

就算你不懂硬件也能轻松使用

And so combining both of those dreams, we actually designed a product. And I found the designer and we designed the packaging and everything. And we wanted to make it out of plastic and we had the whole thing ready to go. But we needed some money for tooling the cases and things like that. We needed a few thousand of dollars. And this was way beyond me.

这就是我们对Apple II的基本设想。我找到设计师,设计了所有细节。我们还打算使用塑料机身,什么都想好了。可我们资金不足,还缺几万美元。

So I went looking for some venture capital.

于是我开始寻找风险投资

And I ran across one venture capitalist name Don Valentine, who came over to the garage

我找到Don Valentine,他还来参观了我的车库

and he later said I look like a renegade from the human race, that was his famous quote.

他说我看起来像人类的叛逆者,这话成了他的名言

And he said he wasn't willing to invest us but he recommended a few people to mine.

虽然他不打算投资,但推荐了几个人给我

One of those was Mike Markkula.

其中就有Mike Markkula

So I called Mike on the phone and he came over.

我给Mike打电话,跟他见了面

And Mike had retired for about 30 or 31 from the Intel, he was a product manager there and got a little bit stock.

Mike以前是英特尔的产品经理,他大概30岁离开英特尔,手里有英特尔的股票

And, you know, like made a million bucks on stock options, which at that time was quite a lot of money.

他靠股票期权赚了一百多万,当时非常富有

《乔布斯传》第五章:苹果一代 开机 启动 接入34

Garage Band

车库工厂

The Jobs house in Los Altos became the assembly point for the fifty Apple I boards that had to be delivered to the Byte Shop within thirty days, when the payment for the parts would come due. All available hands were enlisted: Jobs and Wozniak, plus Daniel Kottke, his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Holmes (who had broken away from the cult she’d joined), and Jobs’s pregnant sister, Patty. Her vacated bedroom as well as the kitchen table and garage were commandeered as work space. Holmes, who had taken jewelry classes, was given the task of soldering chips. “Most I did well, but I got flux on a few of them,” she recalled. This didn’t please Jobs. “We don’t have a chip to spare,” he railed, correctly. He shifted her to bookkeeping and paperwork at the kitchen table, and he did the soldering himself. When they completed a board, they would hand it off to Wozniak. “I would plug each assembled board into the TV and keyboard to test it to see if it worked,” he said. “If it did, I put it in a box. If it didn’t, I’d figure what pin hadn’t gotten into the socket right.”

乔布斯一家位于洛斯阿尔托斯的房子,成为了这50块AppleI主板的组装工厂。主板必须在30天内送到ByteShop,因为零件的付款期限就是30天。所有人都加入了——乔布斯和沃兹,还有丹尼尔·科特基和他的前女友伊丽莎白·霍姆斯(她已经脱离了之前加入的邪教组织),以及乔布斯怀孕了的妹妹帕蒂。帕蒂空出来的卧室,以及厨房的桌子,还有车库都变成了工作地点。霍姆斯曾经上过珠宝课程,所以她被安排焊接芯片。“大多数我都做得不错,可是有几个被我滴上了助焊剂。”她说。这让乔布斯很不高兴,他埋怨道:“我们可没有多余的芯片。”事实的确如此。他把霍姆斯调到了厨房桌子上去负责记账和文书工作,他自己负责焊接。他们做完一块电路板后,就交到沃兹尼亚克手中。“我会把装好的主板连接上电视机和键盘进行测试,看看能不能工作,”他说,“如果能工作了,我就把它装进盒子里,如果不能的话,我还要找出哪只管脚没插好。”

Paul Jobs suspended his sideline of repairing old cars so that the Apple team could have the whole garage. He put in a long old workbench, hung a schematic of the computer on the new plasterboard wall he built, and set up rows of labeled drawers for the components. He also built a burn box bathed in heat lamps so the computer boards could be tested by running overnight at high temperatures. When there was the occasional eruption of temper, an occurrence not uncommon around his son, Paul would impart some of his calm. “What’s the matter?” he would say. “You got a feather up your ass?” In return he occasionally asked to borrow back the TV set so he could watch the end of a football game. During some of these breaks, Jobs and Kottke would go outside and play guitar on the lawn.

保罗·乔布斯也停下了自己修理汽车的副业,这样一来苹果公司的一帮人就能占用整个车库了。他在车库里放了一张长长的旧工作台,在他刚弄好的石膏板墙上挂了一张电脑示意图,还装了一排贴好标签的抽屉用来放零件。他还用好几台加热灯搭了一个高温箱,这样就可以测试主板在高温下连夜运转的状态。每当他的儿子脾气爆发的时候(这是很常见的现象),保罗·乔布斯就会把自己的冷静传输给他一些。“怎么啦?”他会说,“火烧屁股了?”作为交换,他偶尔会把电视机借走,因为这是家中唯一的一台,他要看橄榄球比赛的终场。这时候,乔布斯和科特基就会到外面的草坪上弹吉他。

Clara Jobs didn’t mind losing most of her house to piles of parts and houseguests, but she was frustrated by her son’s increasingly quirky diets. “She would roll her eyes at his latest eating obsessions,” recalled Holmes. “She just wanted him to be healthy, and he would be making weird pronouncements like, ‘I’m a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight.’”

乔布斯的母亲并不介意自己的家被一大堆零件和客人占领,但是儿子越来越怪异的饮食习惯让她很受挫。乔布斯的饮食强迫症总是招来她的白眼,”霍姆斯回忆说,“她只想要儿子健康,而乔布斯却会发表一些奇怪的宣言,比如:‘我是个果食主义者,我只吃由处女在月光下采摘的叶子。’”

After a dozen assembled boards had been approved by Wozniak, Jobs drove them over to the Byte Shop. Terrell was a bit taken aback. There was no power supply, case, monitor, or keyboard. He had expected something more finished. But Jobs stared him down, and he agreed to take delivery and pay.

12块组装好的主板经过沃兹尼亚克检验合格后,被乔布斯送到了ByteShop。特雷尔有点儿吃惊。没有电源,没有外壳,没有显示器也没有键盘。他期待的可不是这样的产品。但乔布斯死死盯着他,他只好同意收货付钱。

After thirty days Apple was on the verge of being profitable. “We were able to build the boards more cheaply than we thought, because I got a good deal on parts,” Jobs recalled. “So the fifty we sold to the Byte Shop almost paid for all the material we needed to make a hundred boards.” Now they could make a real profit by selling the remaining fifty to their friends and Homebrew compatriots.

30天之后,苹果公司已经接近赢利状态了。“这些主板的实际造价比我们预想的要低,因为零件我买得很划算,”乔布斯回忆道,“所以我们卖给ByteShop50块主板收回的钱,足够支付100块主板的材料费。”通过把剩下的50块卖给朋友和家酿计算机俱乐部的同仁,他们可以真正实现赢利了。

Elizabeth Holmes officially became the part-time bookkeeper at $4 an hour, driving down from San Francisco once a week and figuring out how to port Jobs’s checkbook into a ledger. In order to make Apple seem like a real company, Jobs hired an answering service, which would relay messages to his mother. Ron Wayne drew a logo, using the ornate line-drawing style of Victorian illustrated fiction, that featured Newton sitting under a tree framed by a quote from Wordsworth: “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” It was a rather odd motto, one that fit Wayne’s self-image more than Apple Computer. Perhaps a better Wordsworth line would have been the poet’s description of those involved in the start of the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!” As Wozniak later exulted, “We were participating in the biggest revolution that had ever happened, I thought. I was so happy to be a part of it.”

伊丽莎白·霍姆斯正式成为了苹果的兼职记账员,时薪4美元,她每周从旧金山回来一次,想办法把乔布斯支票簿上的数目移入总账。为了看上去像一家正规公司,乔布斯租用了接听电话服务,所有的留言都会被转给他母亲。罗恩·韦恩为公司设计了商标,他使用维多利亚时代插图小说风格的华丽线描,画的是牛顿坐在一棵树下,边框上还引用了华兹华斯的一句诗:“一个灵魂,永远孤独地航行在陌生的思想海洋中。”这是略显古怪的一句格言,其实更加符合罗恩·韦恩的自身形象,而不是苹果公司。也许更加贴切的诗句来自华兹华斯对法国大革命的发起者的描述:“能活在黎明时光是何等幸福/但在那时是个青年更胜似天堂!正如后来沃兹欣喜谈到的:“我想我们参与了历史上最伟大的革命,我很髙兴自己是其中的一分子。”


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重点单词
  • quoten. 引用 v. 引述,举证,报价
  • guitarn. 吉他
  • kitchenn. 厨房,(全套)炊具,灶间
  • paymentn. 支付,付款,报偿,报应
  • occasionallyadv. 偶尔地
  • bandn. 带,箍,波段 n. 队,一群,乐队 v. 绑扎 v
  • ornateadj. 装饰的,华丽的
  • venturen. 冒险,风险,投机 v. 尝试,谨慎地做,冒险一试
  • supplyn. 补给,供给,供应,贮备 vt. 补给,供给,提供,
  • renegaden. 叛徒,变节者,判党者 adj. 背弃的,叛徒的 v