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.”

當蘋果開始著手研發麥金塔電腦時，喬布斯前去拜訪蓋茨。微軟曾為蘋果的AppleII電腦編寫過一些應用程序，其中包括名為“Multiplan”的電子表格程序。這一次，喬布斯想鼓動蓋茨和微軟為其即將推出的麥金塔電腦編寫更多程序。坐在蓋茨位于西雅圖華盛頓湖邊的會議室中，喬布斯勾畫出一幅誘人的圖景——加利福尼亞的某家自動化工廠將會大批量生產界面友好的大眾電腦。在他的描述中，眭元件被送進工廠，完整的麥金塔電腦魚貫而出。微軟團隊因此給該項目取了個代號，叫“沙”（Sand）①。他們甚至又把它演繹成了一旬話的縮略詞：史蒂夫的神奇新機器（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.

蓋茨創立微軟，是源于為阿爾泰計算機編寫BASIC語言版本（BASIC是Beginner-sAll-purposeSymbolicInstructionCode的縮寫，即初學者通用符號指令代碼，是一種編程語言，非技術人員能夠用它更容易地編寫出可以跨平臺運行的軟件程序）。喬布斯希望微軟為麥金塔電腦編寫BASIC程序5因為盡管喬布斯多次敦促，沃茲尼亞克從未改進AppleII的BASIC語言版本以提髙處理浮點數的能力。此外，喬布斯還希望微軟能為麥金塔電腦編寫一些應用軟件，如文字處理軟件、圖表和電子表格程序。蓋茨簽下了合同，除BASIC程序外，還為蘋果公司開發圖形界面版本的軟件——文字處理程序Word和全新的電子表格軟件Excel。 當時，喬布斯已功成名就，蓋茨還只是個跟班：1984年，蘋果公司的年銷售額達15億美元，而微軟只有1億美元。因此，蓋茨前往庫比蒂諾觀看麥金塔操作系統的演示，同行的還有三位微軟的同事，其中包括查爾斯·西蒙尼（CharlesSimonyi）,他曾在施樂工作。由于麥金塔電腦當時還沒有完整可用的樣機，安迪·赫茨菲爾德只能在麗薩電腦上運行麥金塔軟件，并通過麥金塔電腦樣機的屏幕進行顯示。

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.’”

蓋茨并沒有覺得自己看到的東西有多了不起。“我記得第一次去的時候，史蒂夫運行了一個應用程序，不過就是一些東西在屏幕上跳來跳去，”他回憶說，“這是唯一能夠在他們機器上運行的應用程序。當時MacPaint②還未完成。”此外，喬布斯的態度也令蓋茨反感。“我們此行有點兒被誘騸的詭異感覺。史蒂夫說，我們也不是真的需要你們，我們正在做的這個東西很偉大，它還處于保密之中。這是他自己慣用的銷售方式，潛臺詞是‘我不需要你，但可能會讓你參與進來。’”

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.”

麥金塔團隊的“海盜們”也覺得蓋茨令人難以忍受。“你會發現，比爾·蓋茨不是個很好的聽眾——他不接受任何人向自己解釋某個東西如何運作，他要搶在別人前面提出他對這個東西如何運轉的推斷，猜想他覺得這個是怎么運作的。”赫茨菲爾德回憶道。他們向蓋茨展示麥金塔電腦的光標如何不閃爍而能在屏幕上流暢地移動。蓋茨發問你們用什么硬件來繪制光標？”赫茨菲爾德感到非常自豪，因為他們只依靠軟件就實現了這個功能。他回答說：“我們沒有用任何特殊的硬件！”蓋茨不信，堅持認為必須有某種特殊硬件的支持，光標才會出現這樣的移動效果。麥金塔團隊的一位工程師布魯斯·霍恩后來說：“你還能跟這樣的人說什么呢？這件事讓我明白，蓋茨不是那種能夠理解或欣賞麥金塔電腦優雅之處的人。”

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.

盡管兩隊人馬互有戒心，但想到微軟為麥金塔電腦制作圖形界面軟件，能將個人電腦帶入一個新境界，雙方都非常興奮，他們前往一家豪華餐廳吃飯慶祝。微軟很快組建了一個型團隊負責這個項目。“我們在Mac項目上的人比蘋果公司的還多廣蓋茨說道，“他們有大約十四五個人，我們有將近二十人。我們真的把命都押在這上面了。”盡管喬布斯覺得他們沒什么品位，但微軟的程序員們非常堅持不懈。“他們一開始做出的應用程序很糟糕，”喬布斯回憶說，“但是他們堅持努力，越做越好。”最后，喬布斯對Excel非常喜愛，以至于和蓋茨作了個秘密協議：如果微軟在未來兩年的時間里只為麥金塔做Excel，而不開發個人電腦版本，那么喬布斯就同意撤掉麥金塔電腦的BASIC團隊，而無限期使用微軟開發的BASIC程序。蓋茨精明地接受了這一提議，而此事卻激怒了蘋果公司遭到解散的BASIC團隊，也讓微軟在日后的談判中獲得了優勢。

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.”

蓋茨和喬布斯暫時結下了良好的關系。那年夏天，他們前往威斯康星州日內瓦湖的花花公子俱樂部，參加行業析師本·羅森（BenRosen）舉辦的一個會議。當時沒人知道蘋果正在開發圖形界面。蓋茨回憶：“當時所有人好像都覺得個人電腦就是一切。這樣很好。但是史蒂夫和我就暗自得意，嘿，我們也有個好東西。當時他也多多少少透露出我們在做什么了，但沒有人真正理解。”蓋茨成了蘋果公司的常客，他說：“每次聚餐我都去，已經成了那兒的一分子了。”