|
????假如這聽來像是老黃歷，還請見諒。這個故事我從來沒有發表過，而我在想，此時不說，更待何時？ ????1982年12月，一大群記者聚集在皮埃爾的會議室里。皮埃爾是一家豪華酒店，史蒂夫?喬布斯日后選擇在其南邊僅一街之隔的地方，修建了紐約第五大道標志性的蘋果巨型玻璃圓柱旗艦店。 ????時年26歲的喬布斯在酒店向媒體介紹偉大的Lisa電腦。他賣力的推銷這款電腦，盡管（我們后來得知）他已經被迫離開Lisa團隊，并控制了另一個絕密項目。 ????我當時是《時代》雜志（Time）的記者兼調研員，正處于為期一年的撰稿人試用考核期。我之前聽說Lisa電腦和施樂（Xero）帕洛阿爾托研究中心（Palo Alto Research Center）的研究成果有些關聯。為了準備這次會議，我提前反復研讀了自己當時能找到的關于該研究中心的唯一詳實資料——發表在《字節》雜志（Byte）上的一篇有關Smalltalk的長文。 ????Smalltalk是一種面向對象的編程語言，由施樂帕洛阿爾托研究中心的阿倫?凱所發明。凱是計算機界的先驅，提出了著名的WYSIWYG（所見即所得）術語，他帶領團隊創造了第一臺可以進行位圖映射的顯示器和施樂Alto上的GUI（用戶圖形界面）。施樂Alto是一臺由鼠標驅動的電腦。 ????喬布斯在不停地炫耀Lisa上他所謂的突破性創新——鼠標、視窗界面、下拉菜單，而我則一直在等他談談Lisa對施樂帕洛阿爾托研究中心、施樂Alto以及阿倫?凱的虧欠。但他始終沒有提到這些，于是我開始鍥而不舍地追問他關于Smalltalk的問題。他終于轉向我，厲聲說道：“我們與Smalltalk完全沒關系。” ????完全沒關系？ ????我后來得知自己為《時代》寫的關于Lisa的文章《鼠標元年》（The Year of the Mouse）激怒了喬布斯。但這不是因為我提到了Smalltalk、帕洛阿爾托研究中心以及道格拉斯?恩格爾巴特（鼠標的發明者），而是因為我披露了蘋果已經在大力研發新一代產品：“縮小版的Lisa，稱為Mackintosh（為Mclntosh蘋果拼寫之誤）”。（Mclntosh是美國一高端音響品牌——譯注） ????后來發現，其實是我自己拼寫錯了。 ????譯者：項航 |
|
|
????Pardon me if this feels like ancient history. But this is a story I've never put into print (or pixels) before, and I figured if not now, when? ????It was December 1982 and a crowd of journalists had gathered in a meeting room at The Pierre, a luxury hotel one block north of the site Steve Jobs would later choose for the Fifth Avenue Apple Store's big glass cube. ????Jobs, then 26, was there to introduce the media to the wonders of the Lisa. He was selling it hard, even though (we later learned) he'd already been forced off the Lisa team and had seized control of a second, top-secret project. ????I was a reporter-researcher at Time magazine on a 12-month probationary writer's trial. I'd heard that the Lisa had something to do with work done at Xerox's (XRX) Palo Alto Research Center, and to prep for the meeting I had read and re-read the only substantive story I could find about Xerox PARC -- a long article in Byte magazine on Smalltalk. ????Smalltalk was an object-oriented programming language created at PARC by Alan Kay -- the computing pioneer who coined the term WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and led the team that created the first bit-mapped display and GUI (graphical user interface) on the mouse-driven Xerox Alto. ????As Jobs showed off what he described as Lisa's breakthrough innovations -- the mouse, the windows, the pull-down menus -- I waited for him to say something about Lisa's debt to Xerox PARC, the Alto and Alan Kay. When he didn't, I started pestering him with questions about Smalltalk. He finally turned to me and snapped "This has nothing to do with Smalltalk." ????Nothing? ????I found out later that the story I wrote for Time about Lisa -- The Year of the Mouse -- infuriated Jobs. Not because it mentioned Smalltalk, PARC and Douglas Engelbart (the inventor of the mouse), but because it reported that Apple (AAPL) was already hard at work on its successor: "a scaled-down version of Lisa called Mackintosh (a misspelling of the Mclntosh apple)." ????The real misspelling, it turned out, was mine. |
最新文章