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Xerox PARC
施樂PARC
The Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been established in 1970 to create a spawning ground for digital ideas.
施樂公司的帕洛奧圖研究中心--常被叫做“施樂PARC”--成立于1970年，目的是為數字領域的創想提供成長環境。
It was safely located, for better and for worse, three thousand miles from the commercial pressures of Xerox corporate headquarters in Connecticut.
這里距離康涅狄格州的施樂公司總部3000英里，無論是好是壞，都脫離了那里的商業壓力。
Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced:
工作在這里的諸多夢想家中，有一位叫做艾倫·凱的科學家，他的兩句格言深得喬布斯認同：
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" and "People who are serious about software should make their own hardware."
“預見未來最好的方式就是親手創造未來”以及“對待軟件嚴肅認真的人，應該制造自己專屬的硬件”。
Kay pushed the vision of a small personal computer, dubbed the "Dynabook," that would be easy enough for children to use.
凱推出了小型個人電腦的理念，他稱之為“動態筆記本”，使用簡便，即便是小孩子也能輕松操作。
So Xerox PARC's engineers began to develop user-friendly graphics that could replace all of the command lines and DOS prompts that made computer screens intimidating.
于是，施樂PARC的工程師們開始研發友好的用戶圖形界面，以取代電腦屏幕上那些拒人于千里之外的命令行和DOS提示符。
The metaphor they came up with was that of a desktop.
他們想到，可以把桌面的概念應用到屏幕上。
The screen could have many documents and folders on it, and you could use a mouse to point and click on the one you wanted to use.
屏幕上會有很多文件和文件夾，用戶可以使用鼠標指向并點擊自己想要使用的內容。
This graphical user interface—or GUI, pronounced "gooey"—was facilitated by another concept pioneered at Xerox PARC: bitmapping.
圖形用戶界面--也就是GUI--的發展，也受到了當時施樂PARC另一個先鋒概念“位圖顯示”的推動。
Until then, most computers were character-based.
那個時候，大多數電腦還是基于字符的。
You would type a character on a keyboard, and the computer would generate that character on the screen, usually in glowing greenish phosphor against a dark background.
你在鍵盤上輸入一個字符，計算機就會在屏幕上顯示那個字符，通常是熒光綠色的字符襯上深色的背景。
Since there were a limited number of letters, numerals, and symbols, it didn't take a whole lot of computer code or processing power to accomplish this.
因為字母、數字、符號的數量是有限的，所以這樣的顯示方式并不需要大量的電腦代碼或是很強的處理器性能。
In a bitmap system, on the other hand, each and every pixel on the screen is controlled by bits in the computer's memory.
位圖顯示則相反，屏幕上的每一個像素都是由電腦內存控制的。
To render something on the screen, such as a letter, the computer has to tell each pixel to be light or dark or, in the case of color displays, what color to be.
要在屏幕上顯示某些內容--比如一個字母--電腦就要控制每個像素的明暗，如果是彩色顯示的話，則要控制每個像素的顏色。
This uses a lot of computing power, but it permits gorgeous graphics, fonts, and gee-whiz screen displays.
這會占用大量的系統資源，但是能夠支持炫麗的圖像、字體和驚人的顯本效果。
Bitmapping and graphical interfaces became features of Xerox PARC's prototype computers, such as the Alto, and its object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk.
位圖顯示和圖形界面成為了施樂PARC開發的電腦樣機（比如“奧圖”電腦）和面向對象的編程語言Smalltalk的特性。
Jef Raskin decided that these features were the future of computing.
杰夫·拉斯金認為，這些特性是電腦產業的未來。
So he began urging Jobs and other Apple colleagues to go check out Xerox PARC.
于是他開始催促喬布斯和蘋果的其他同事去施樂PARC考察一番。
