CHAPTER EIGHT

第八章

XEROX AND LISA

施乐和丽萨

Graphical User Interfaces

图形用户界面

A New Baby

一个新孩子

The Apple II took the company from Jobs’s garage to the pinnacle of a new industry. Its sales rose dramatically, from 2,500 units in 1977 to 210,000 in 1981. But Jobs was restless. The Apple II could not remain successful forever, and he knew that, no matter how much he had done to package it, from power cord to case, it would always be seen as Wozniak’s masterpiece. He needed his own machine. More than that, he wanted a product that would, in his words, make a dent in the universe.

AppleII的问世把苹果公司从乔布斯家的车库推向了一个新兴产业的顶峰。它的销量急剧上升，从1977年的2500台猛增到1981年的21万台。但是乔布斯并没有满足。AppleII不可能长盛不衰5而且他知道，无论自己如何从电源线到机箱对其进行包装，人们永远都只会将它视为沃兹尼亚克的杰作。他需要一台属于他的电脑。不仅如此，用他自己的话说，他需要一个在宇宙中留下印迹的产品。

At first he hoped that the Apple III would play that role. It would have more memory, the screen would display eighty characters across rather than forty, and it would handle uppercase and lowercase letters. Indulging his passion for industrial design, Jobs decreed the size and shape of the external case, and he refused to let anyone alter it, even as committees of engineers added more components to the circuit boards. The result was piggybacked boards with poor connectors that frequently failed. When the Apple III began shipping in May 1980, it flopped. Randy Wigginton, one of the engineers, summed it up: “The Apple III was kind of like a baby conceived during a group orgy, and later everybody had this bad headache, and there’s this bastard child, and everyone says, ‘It’s not mine.’”

最初，他希望AppleIII能承担这个角色。AppleIII内存更大，屏幕可以一行显示80个字符而不是40个，并且能区分大小写字母。沉浸在对工业设计的狂热中的乔布斯，严格限定了机箱的尺寸和形状，并拒绝任何人对其进行修改，即便是在工程师往电路板上增加了更多的部件之后。其绪果是附加的小电路板因连接不稳定而频繁失灵。1980年5月，AppleIII上市，但销量惨淡。工程师兰迪·威金顿总结道：“AppleIII有点儿像集体狂欢时怀上的孩子，事后大家都头痛得厉害，至于这个野孩子，人人都说不是自己的。”

By then Jobs had distanced himself from the Apple III and was thrashing about for ways to produce something more radically different. At first he flirted with the idea of touchscreens, but he found himself frustrated. At one demonstration of the technology, he arrived late, fidgeted awhile, then abruptly cut off the engineers in the middle of their presentation with a brusque “Thank you.” They were confused. “Would you like us to leave?” one asked. Jobs said yes, then berated his colleagues for wasting his time.

那个时候，乔布斯已经疏远了AppleIII项目，正焦急地想办法创造出更加与众不同的东西。起初他想过用触摸屏，但后来又泄气了。一次触摸屏技术的演示会上，他迟到了，坐立不安地待了一会儿，然后突然打断了正在演示的工程师，很无礼地说了句“谢谢你们”。工程师们被他弄糊涂了。“你想要我们离开吗？”其中一个问道。乔布斯说是的，然后就痛斥同事们浪费了他的时间。

Then he and Apple hired two engineers from Hewlett-Packard to conceive a totally new computer. The name Jobs chose for it would have caused even the most jaded psychiatrist to do a double take: the Lisa. Other computers had been named after daughters of their designers, but Lisa was a daughter Jobs had abandoned and had not yet fully admitted was his. “Maybe he was doing it out of guilt,” said Andrea Cunningham, who worked at Regis McKenna on public relations for the project. “We had to come up with an acronym so that we could claim it was not named after Lisa the child.” The one they reverse-engineered was “local integrated systems architecture,” and despite being meaningless it became the official explanation for the name. Among the engineers it was referred to as “Lisa: invented stupid acronym.” Years later, when I asked about the name, Jobs admitted simply, “Obviously it was named for my daughter.”

之后，他和苹果公司从惠普雇来了两名工程师，设计一台全新的电脑。乔布斯为新电脑挑选的名字能让最迟钝的精神病医生也闻之一怔，随后恍然大悟：丽萨。其他电脑也有以设计者女儿的名字命名的，但是丽萨是被乔布斯拋弃的女儿，他甚至还没有完全承认那孩子是自己的。“他这么做也许是出于内疚吧。”安德烈·坎宁安（AndreaCunningham）说，她当时供职于里吉斯·麦肯纳公司，负责丽萨项目的公关事务。“我们要把丽萨（Lisa）视为一个缩略词，想出和它对应的一句短语。这样就可以宣称这不是以乔布斯女儿的名字来命名的。”他们把这个缩写逆推，得到了“本地集成系统架构”（LocalIntegratedSystemsArchitecture）,尽管这个短语毫无意义，它还是成为了丽萨（Lisa）这个名字的官方解释。工程师们私下把这个名字解释为“Lisa：编造的愚蠢缩写（Lisa：InventedStupidAcronym）”。多年以后，当我向乔布斯问起这个名字的时候，他坦率地承认：“这很显然是以我女儿的名字命名的。”

The Lisa was conceived as a $2,000 machine based on a sixteen-bit microprocessor, rather than the eight-bit one used in the Apple II. Without the wizardry of Wozniak, who was still working quietly on the Apple II, the engineers began producing a straightforward computer with a conventional text display, unable to push the powerful microprocessor to do much exciting stuff. Jobs began to grow impatient with how boring it was turning out to be.

丽萨被定位成一台售价2000美元的电脑，采用16位微处理器，取代了AppleII上使用的8位微处理器。缺少了当时仍在AppleII项目中埋头苦千的沃兹尼亚克的才华，工程师们开始制造一台中规中矩的电脑，它使用传统的文本显示，也无法释放微处理器的强大性能去完成激动人心的任务。这款产品日渐显现出它的平庸，乔布斯开始失去耐心了。