Garage Band

車庫(kù)工廠

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.”

喬布斯一家位于洛斯阿爾托斯的房子，成為了這50塊AppleI主板的組裝工廠。主板必須在30天內(nèi)送到ByteShop，因?yàn)榱慵母犊钇谙蘧褪?0天。所有人都加入了——喬布斯和沃茲，還有丹尼爾·科特基和他的前女友伊麗莎白·霍姆斯（她已經(jīng)脫離了之前加入的邪教組織），以及喬布斯懷孕了的妹妹帕蒂。帕蒂空出來(lái)的臥室，以及廚房的桌子，還有車庫(kù)都變成了工作地點(diǎn)。霍姆斯曾經(jīng)上過(guò)珠寶課程，所以她被安排焊接芯片。“大多數(shù)我都做得不錯(cuò)，可是有幾個(gè)被我滴上了助焊劑。”她說(shuō)。這讓喬布斯很不高興，他埋怨道：“我們可沒有多余的芯片。”事實(shí)的確如此。他把霍姆斯調(diào)到了廚房桌子上去負(fù)責(zé)記賬和文書工作，他自己負(fù)責(zé)焊接。他們做完一塊電路板后，就交到沃茲尼亞克手中。“我會(huì)把裝好的主板連接上電視機(jī)和鍵盤進(jìn)行測(cè)試，看看能不能工作，”他說(shuō)，“如果能工作了，我就把它裝進(jìn)盒子里，如果不能的話，我還要找出哪只管腳沒插好。”

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.

保羅·喬布斯也停下了自己修理汽車的副業(yè)，這樣一來(lái)蘋果公司的一幫人就能占用整個(gè)車庫(kù)了。他在車庫(kù)里放了一張長(zhǎng)長(zhǎng)的舊工作臺(tái)，在他剛弄好的石膏板墻上掛了一張電腦示意圖，還裝了一排貼好標(biāo)簽的抽屜用來(lái)放零件。他還用好幾臺(tái)加熱燈搭了一個(gè)高溫箱，這樣就可以測(cè)試主板在高溫下連夜運(yùn)轉(zhuǎn)的狀態(tài)。每當(dāng)他的兒子脾氣爆發(fā)的時(shí)候（這是很常見的現(xiàn)象），保羅·喬布斯就會(huì)把自己的冷靜傳輸給他一些。“怎么啦？”他會(huì)說(shuō)，“火燒屁股了？”作為交換，他偶爾會(huì)把電視機(jī)借走，因?yàn)檫@是家中唯一的一臺(tái)，他要看橄欖球比賽的終場(chǎng)。這時(shí)候，喬布斯和科特基就會(huì)到外面的草坪上彈吉他。

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.’”

喬布斯的母親并不介意自己的家被一大堆零件和客人占領(lǐng)，但是兒子越來(lái)越怪異的飲食習(xí)慣讓她很受挫。喬布斯的飲食強(qiáng)迫癥總是招來(lái)她的白眼，”霍姆斯回憶說(shuō)，“她只想要兒子健康，而喬布斯卻會(huì)發(fā)表一些奇怪的宣言，比如：‘我是個(gè)果食主義者，我只吃由處女在月光下采摘的葉子。’”

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塊組裝好的主板經(jīng)過(guò)沃茲尼亞克檢驗(yàn)合格后，被喬布斯送到了ByteShop。特雷爾有點(diǎn)兒吃驚。沒有電源，沒有外殼，沒有顯示器也沒有鍵盤。他期待的可不是這樣的產(chǎn)品。但喬布斯死死盯著他，他只好同意收貨付錢。

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，蘋果公司已經(jīng)接近贏利狀態(tài)了。“這些主板的實(shí)際造價(jià)比我們預(yù)想的要低，因?yàn)榱慵屹I得很劃算，”喬布斯回憶道，“所以我們賣給ByteShop50塊主板收回的錢，足夠支付100塊主板的材料費(fèi)。”通過(guò)把剩下的50塊賣給朋友和家釀?dòng)?jì)算機(jī)俱樂(lè)部的同仁，他們可以真正實(shí)現(xiàn)贏利了。

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.”

伊麗莎白·霍姆斯正式成為了蘋果的兼職記賬員，時(shí)薪4美元，她每周從舊金山回來(lái)一次，想辦法把喬布斯支票簿上的數(shù)目移入總賬。為了看上去像一家正規(guī)公司，喬布斯租用了接聽電話服務(wù)，所有的留言都會(huì)被轉(zhuǎn)給他母親。羅恩·韋恩為公司設(shè)計(jì)了商標(biāo)，他使用維多利亞時(shí)代插圖小說(shuō)風(fēng)格的華麗線描，畫的是牛頓坐在一棵樹下，邊框上還引用了華茲華斯的一句詩(shī)：“一個(gè)靈魂，永遠(yuǎn)孤獨(dú)地航行在陌生的思想海洋中。”這是略顯古怪的一句格言，其實(shí)更加符合羅恩·韋恩的自身形象，而不是蘋果公司。也許更加貼切的詩(shī)句來(lái)自華茲華斯對(duì)法國(guó)大革命的發(fā)起者的描述：“能活在黎明時(shí)光是何等幸福/但在那時(shí)是個(gè)青年更勝似天堂!正如后來(lái)沃茲欣喜談到的：“我想我們參與了歷史上最偉大的革命，我很髙興自己是其中的一分子。”