When the Macintosh was first being developed, Jobs went up to visit Gates at his office near Seattle. Microsoft had written some applications for the Apple II, including a spreadsheet program called Multiplan, and Jobs wanted to excite Gates and Co. about doing even more for the forthcoming Macintosh. Sitting in Gates’s conference room, Jobs spun an enticing vision of a computer for the masses, with a friendly interface, which would be churned out by the millions in an automated California factory. His description of the dream factory sucking in the California silicon components and turning out finished Macintoshes caused the Microsoft team to code-name the project “Sand.” They even reverse-engineered it into an acronym, for “Steve’s amazing new device.”

当苹果开始着手研发麦金塔电脑时，乔布斯前去拜访盖茨。微软曾为苹果的AppleII电脑编写过一些应用程序，其中包括名为“Multiplan”的电子表格程序。这一次，乔布斯想鼓动盖茨和微软为其即将推出的麦金塔电脑编写更多程序。坐在盖茨位于西雅图华盛顿湖边的会议室中，乔布斯勾画出一幅诱人的图景——加利福尼亚的某家自动化工厂将会大批量生产界面友好的大众电脑。在他的描述中，眭元件被送进工厂，完整的麦金塔电脑鱼贯而出。微软团队因此给该项目取了个代号，叫“沙”（Sand）①。他们甚至又把它演绎成了一旬话的缩略词：史蒂夫的神奇新机器（Steve-sAmazingNewDevice）。

Gates had launched Microsoft by writing a version of BASIC, a programming language, for the Altair. Jobs wanted Microsoft to write a version of BASIC for the Macintosh, because Wozniak—despite much prodding by Jobs—had never enhanced his version of the Apple II’s BASIC to handle floating-point numbers. In addition, Jobs wanted Microsoft to write application software—such as word processing and spreadsheet programs—for the Macintosh. At the time, Jobs was a king and Gates still a courtier: In 1982 Apple’s annual sales were $1 billion, while Microsoft’s were a mere $32 million. Gates signed on to do graphical versions of a new spreadsheet called Excel, a word-processing program called Word, and BASIC.

盖茨创立微软，是源于为阿尔泰计算机编写BASIC语言版本（BASIC是Beginner-sAll-purposeSymbolicInstructionCode的缩写，即初学者通用符号指令代码，是一种编程语言，非技术人员能够用它更容易地编写出可以跨平台运行的软件程序）。乔布斯希望微软为麦金塔电脑编写BASIC程序5因为尽管乔布斯多次敦促，沃兹尼亚克从未改进AppleII的BASIC语言版本以提髙处理浮点数的能力。此外，乔布斯还希望微软能为麦金塔电脑编写一些应用软件，如文字处理软件、图表和电子表格程序。盖茨签下了合同，除BASIC程序外，还为苹果公司开发图形界面版本的软件——文字处理程序Word和全新的电子表格软件Excel。 当时，乔布斯已功成名就，盖茨还只是个跟班：1984年，苹果公司的年销售额达15亿美元，而微软只有1亿美元。因此，盖茨前往库比蒂诺观看麦金塔操作系统的演示，同行的还有三位微软的同事，其中包括查尔斯·西蒙尼（CharlesSimonyi）,他曾在施乐工作。由于麦金塔电脑当时还没有完整可用的样机，安迪·赫茨菲尔德只能在丽萨电脑上运行麦金塔软件，并通过麦金塔电脑样机的屏幕进行显示。

Gates frequently went to Cupertino for demonstrations of the Macintosh operating system, and he was not very impressed. “I remember the first time we went down, Steve had this app where it was just things bouncing around on the screen,” he said. “That was the only app that ran.” Gates was also put off by Jobs’s attitude. “It was kind of a weird seduction visit, where Steve was saying, ‘We don’t really need you and we’re doing this great thing, and it’s under the cover.’ He’s in his Steve Jobs sales mode, but kind of the sales mode that also says, ‘I don’t need you, but I might let you be involved.’”

盖茨并没有觉得自己看到的东西有多了不起。“我记得第一次去的时候，史蒂夫运行了一个应用程序，不过就是一些东西在屏幕上跳来跳去，”他回忆说，“这是唯一能够在他们机器上运行的应用程序。当时MacPaint②还未完成。”此外，乔布斯的态度也令盖茨反感。“我们此行有点儿被诱骟的诡异感觉。史蒂夫说，我们也不是真的需要你们，我们正在做的这个东西很伟大，它还处于保密之中。这是他自己惯用的销售方式，潜台词是‘我不需要你，但可能会让你参与进来。’”

The Macintosh pirates found Gates hard to take. “You could tell that Bill Gates was not a very good listener. He couldn’t bear to have anyone explain how something worked to him—he had to leap ahead instead and guess about how he thought it would work,” Hertzfeld recalled. They showed him how the Macintosh’s cursor moved smoothly across the screen without flickering. “What kind of hardware do you use to draw the cursor?” Gates asked. Hertzfeld, who took great pride that they could achieve their functionality solely using software, replied, “We don’t have any special hardware for it!” Gates insisted that it was necessary to have special hardware to move the cursor that way. “So what do you say to somebody like that?” Bruce Horn, one of the Macintosh engineers, later said. “It made it clear to me that Gates was not the kind of person that would understand or appreciate the elegance of a Macintosh.”

麦金塔团队的“海盗们”也觉得盖茨令人难以忍受。“你会发现，比尔·盖茨不是个很好的听众——他不接受任何人向自己解释某个东西如何运作，他要抢在别人前面提出他对这个东西如何运转的推断，猜想他觉得这个是怎么运作的。”赫茨菲尔德回忆道。他们向盖茨展示麦金塔电脑的光标如何不闪烁而能在屏幕上流畅地移动。盖茨发问你们用什么硬件来绘制光标？”赫茨菲尔德感到非常自豪，因为他们只依靠软件就实现了这个功能。他回答说：“我们没有用任何特殊的硬件！”盖茨不信，坚持认为必须有某种特殊硬件的支持，光标才会出现这样的移动效果。麦金塔团队的一位工程师布鲁斯·霍恩后来说：“你还能跟这样的人说什么呢？这件事让我明白，盖茨不是那种能够理解或欣赏麦金塔电脑优雅之处的人。”

Despite their mutual wariness, both teams were excited by the prospect that Microsoft would create graphical software for the Macintosh that would take personal computing into a new realm, and they went to dinner at a fancy restaurant to celebrate. Microsoft soon dedicated a large team to the task. “We had more people working on the Mac than he did,” Gates said. “He had about fourteen or fifteen people. We had like twenty people. We really bet our life on it.” And even though Jobs thought that they didn’t exhibit much taste, the Microsoft programmers were persistent. “They came out with applications that were terrible,” Jobs recalled, “but they kept at it and they made them better.” Eventually Jobs became so enamored of Excel that he made a secret bargain with Gates: If Microsoft would make Excel exclusively for the Macintosh for two years, and not make a version for IBM PCs, then Jobs would shut down his team working on a version of BASIC for the Macintosh and instead indefinitely license Microsoft’s BASIC. Gates smartly took the deal, which infuriated the Apple team whose project got canceled and gave Microsoft a lever in future negotiations.

尽管两队人马互有戒心，但想到微软为麦金塔电脑制作图形界面软件，能将个人电脑带入一个新境界，双方都非常兴奋，他们前往一家豪华餐厅吃饭庆祝。微软很快组建了一个型团队负责这个项目。“我们在Mac项目上的人比苹果公司的还多广盖茨说道，“他们有大约十四五个人，我们有将近二十人。我们真的把命都押在这上面了。”尽管乔布斯觉得他们没什么品位，但微软的程序员们非常坚持不懈。“他们一开始做出的应用程序很糟糕，”乔布斯回忆说，“但是他们坚持努力，越做越好。”最后，乔布斯对Excel非常喜爱，以至于和盖茨作了个秘密协议：如果微软在未来两年的时间里只为麦金塔做Excel，而不开发个人电脑版本，那么乔布斯就同意撤掉麦金塔电脑的BASIC团队，而无限期使用微软开发的BASIC程序。盖茨精明地接受了这一提议，而此事却激怒了苹果公司遭到解散的BASIC团队，也让微软在日后的谈判中获得了优势。

For the time being, Gates and Jobs forged a bond. That summer they went to a conference hosted by the industry analyst Ben Rosen at a Playboy Club retreat in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where nobody knew about the graphical interfaces that Apple was developing. “Everybody was acting like the IBM PC was everything, which was nice, but Steve and I were kind of smiling that, hey, we’ve got something,” Gates recalled. “And he’s kind of leaking, but nobody actually caught on.” Gates became a regular at Apple retreats. “I went to every luau,” said Gates. “I was part of the crew.”

盖茨和乔布斯暂时结下了良好的关系。那年夏天，他们前往威斯康星州日内瓦湖的花花公子俱乐部，参加行业析师本·罗森（BenRosen）举办的一个会议。当时没人知道苹果正在开发图形界面。盖茨回忆：“当时所有人好像都觉得个人电脑就是一切。这样很好。但是史蒂夫和我就暗自得意，嘿，我们也有个好东西。当时他也多多少少透露出我们在做什么了，但没有人真正理解。”盖茨成了苹果公司的常客，他说：“每次聚餐我都去，已经成了那儿的一分子了。”