CHAPTER EIGHT

第八章

XEROX AND LISA

施樂和麗薩

Graphical User Interfaces

圖形用戶界面

A New Baby

一個新孩子

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的問世把蘋果公司從喬布斯家的車庫推向了一個新興產業的頂峰。它的銷量急劇上升，從1977年的2500臺猛增到1981年的21萬臺。但是喬布斯并沒有滿足。AppleII不可能長盛不衰5而且他知道，無論自己如何從電源線到機箱對其進行包裝，人們永遠都只會將它視為沃茲尼亞克的杰作。他需要一臺屬于他的電腦。不僅如此，用他自己的話說，他需要一個在宇宙中留下印跡的產品。

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能承擔這個角色。AppleIII內存更大，屏幕可以一行顯示80個字符而不是40個，并且能區分大小寫字母。沉浸在對工業設計的狂熱中的喬布斯，嚴格限定了機箱的尺寸和形狀，并拒絕任何人對其進行修改，即便是在工程師往電路板上增加了更多的部件之后。其緒果是附加的小電路板因連接不穩定而頻繁失靈。1980年5月，AppleIII上市，但銷量慘淡。工程師蘭迪·威金頓總結道：“AppleIII有點兒像集體狂歡時懷上的孩子，事后大家都頭痛得厲害，至于這個野孩子，人人都說不是自己的。”

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.

那個時候，喬布斯已經疏遠了AppleIII項目，正焦急地想辦法創造出更加與眾不同的東西。起初他想過用觸摸屏，但后來又泄氣了。一次觸摸屏技術的演示會上，他遲到了，坐立不安地待了一會兒，然后突然打斷了正在演示的工程師，很無禮地說了句“謝謝你們”。工程師們被他弄糊涂了。“你想要我們離開嗎？”其中一個問道。喬布斯說是的，然后就痛斥同事們浪費了他的時間。

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，他和蘋果公司從惠普雇來了兩名工程師，設計一臺全新的電腦。喬布斯為新電腦挑選的名字能讓最遲鈍的精神病醫生也聞之一怔，隨后恍然大悟：麗薩。其他電腦也有以設計者女兒的名字命名的，但是麗薩是被喬布斯拋棄的女兒，他甚至還沒有完全承認那孩子是自己的。“他這么做也許是出于內疚吧。”安德烈·坎寧安（AndreaCunningham）說，她當時供職于里吉斯·麥肯納公司，負責麗薩項目的公關事務。“我們要把麗薩（Lisa）視為一個縮略詞，想出和它對應的一句短語。這樣就可以宣稱這不是以喬布斯女兒的名字來命名的。”他們把這個縮寫逆推，得到了“本地集成系統架構”（LocalIntegratedSystemsArchitecture）,盡管這個短語毫無意義，它還是成為了麗薩（Lisa）這個名字的官方解釋。工程師們私下把這個名字解釋為“Lisa：編造的愚蠢縮寫（Lisa：InventedStupidAcronym）”。多年以后，當我向喬布斯問起這個名字的時候，他坦率地承認：“這很顯然是以我女兒的名字命名的。”

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.

麗薩被定位成一臺售價2000美元的電腦，采用16位微處理器，取代了AppleII上使用的8位微處理器。缺少了當時仍在AppleII項目中埋頭苦千的沃茲尼亞克的才華，工程師們開始制造一臺中規中矩的電腦，它使用傳統的文本顯示，也無法釋放微處理器的強大性能去完成激動人心的任務。這款產品日漸顯現出它的平庸，喬布斯開始失去耐心了。