1983-06-15 Steve Jobs.Speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen

“Computers and society are out on a first date.”

"计算机和社会第一次约会"

Steve spoke to designers at this annual gathering in Aspen, Colorado, on June 15, 1983, five months after Apple introduced the Lisa computer.

1983 年 6 月 15 日，即苹果公司推出 Lisa 电脑五个月后，史蒂夫在科罗拉多州阿斯彭举行的年度聚会上向设计师们发表了演讲。

How many of you are over thirty-six years old? You were born pre-computer. Computers are thirty-six years old. I think there’s going to be a little slice in the timeline of history as we look back, a pretty meaningful slice right there. A lot of you are products of the television generation. I’m pretty much a product of the television generation, but to some extent starting to be a product of the computer generation.

你们当中有多少人超过了三十六岁？你们出生时还没有电脑。计算机已经诞生三十六年了。我想，当我们回顾历史的时候，会发现历史的时间轴上会有一个小小的切口，一个非常有意义的切口。你们中的很多人都是电视时代的产物。我差不多也是电视世代的产物，但在某种程度上，我也开始成为电脑世代的产物。

But the kids growing up now are definitely products of the computer generation, and in their lifetimes the computer will become the predominant medium of communication, just as the television took over from the radio, took over from even the book.

但是，现在成长起来的孩子肯定是电脑一代的产物，在他们的一生中，电脑将成为最主要的通讯媒介，就像电视取代了收音机，甚至取代了书籍一样。

How many of you own an Apple? Any? Or just any personal computer?

你们当中有多少人拥有苹果电脑？有吗？还是任何个人电脑？

Uh-oh. 啊哦

How many of you have used one, or seen one, or anything like that? Good.

你们当中有多少人用过、见过或类似的东西？很好

Computers are really dumb. They’re exceptionally simple, but they’re really fast. The raw instructions that we have to feed these little microprocessors—or even these giant Cray-1 supercomputers—are the most trivial of instructions. They get some data from there, get a number from here, add two numbers together, and test to see if it’s bigger than zero. It’s the most mundane thing you could ever imagine.

计算机真的很笨。它们异常简单，但速度却非常快。我们必须向这些小型微处理器，甚至是这些巨大的 Cray-1 超级计算机提供的原始指令，都是最琐碎的指令。它们从那里得到一些数据，从这里得到一个数字，将两个数字相加，然后测试是否大于零。这是你能想象到的最平凡的事情。

But here’s the key thing: let’s say I could move a hundred times faster than anyone in here. In the blink of your eye, I could run out there, grab a bouquet of fresh spring flowers, run back in here, and snap my fingers. You would all think I was a magician. And yet I would basically be doing a series of really simple instructions: running out there, grabbing some flowers, running back, snapping my fingers. But I could just do them so fast that you would think that there was something magical going on.

但关键是：假设我的行动速度比这里的任何人都快一百倍。眨眼之间，我就能跑到外面，拿起一束新鲜的迎春花，跑回这里，然后打个响指。你们都会以为我是个魔术师。然而，我基本上就是在做一系列非常简单的指令：跑出去，抓几朵花，跑回来，打响指。但我可以做得如此之快，以至于你们会认为我在变魔术。

And it’s the exact same way with a computer. It can do about a million instructions per second. And so we tend to think there’s something magical going on, when in reality, it’s just a series of simple instructions.

电脑也是如此。它每秒可以执行大约一百万个指令。因此，我们往往会认为这里面有什么神奇的东西，而实际上，它只是一系列简单的指令而已。

One of the reasons I’m here is because I need your help. If you’ve looked at computers, they look like garbage. All the great product designers are off designing automobiles or buildings. But hardly any of them are designing computers. If we take a look, we’re going to sell 3 million computers this year, 10 million in ’86, whether they look like a piece of shit or they look great. People are just going to suck this stuff up so fast no matter what it looks like. And it doesn’t cost any more money to make them look great. They are going to be these new objects that are going to be in everyone’s working environment, everyone’s educational environment, and everyone’s home environment. We have a shot [at] putting a great object there—and if we don’t, we’re going to put one more piece-of-junk object there.

我来这里的原因之一是我需要你们的帮助。如果你看过电脑，它们看起来就像垃圾。所有伟大的产品设计师都在设计汽车或建筑。但几乎没有人在设计电脑。如果我们看一看，我们今年要卖出 300 万台电脑，86 年要卖出 1000 万台，不管它们看起来像一堆垃圾还是看起来很棒。不管外观如何，人们都会很快接受它。而且，把它们做得漂亮也不需要花更多的钱。它们将成为每个人的工作环境、教育环境和家庭环境中的新物件。我们有机会[在]那里摆放一件伟大的物品--如果我们做不到，我们就会在那里再摆放一件垃圾物品。

By ’86, ’87, pick a year, people are going to spend more time interacting with these machines than they do interacting with automobiles today. People are going to be spending two, three hours a day interacting with these machines—longer than they spend in the car. And so the industrial design, the software design, and how people interact with these things certainly must be given the consideration that we give automobiles today—if not a lot more.

到 86、87 年，再过一年，人们与这些机器互动的时间将超过今天与汽车互动的时间。人们每天会花两三个小时与这些机器互动，比他们在汽车上花的时间还要长。因此，工业设计、软件设计，以及人们如何与这些东西互动，都必须像我们今天对待汽车一样加以考虑，甚至要考虑得更多。

If you take a look, what we’ve got is a situation where most automobiles are not being designed in the United States. Televisions? Audio electronics? Watches, cameras, bicycles, calculators, you name it: most of the objects of our lives are not designed in America. We’ve blown it. We’ve blown it from an industrial point of view because we’ve lost the markets to foreign competitors. We’ve also blown it from a design point of view.

如果你看一看，我们现在的情况是，大多数汽车都不是在美国设计的。电视机？电子音响？手表、照相机、自行车、计算器......我们生活中的大部分物品都不是美国设计的。我们搞砸了。从工业角度看，我们已经失败了，因为我们的市场被外国竞争者抢走了。从设计角度看，我们也搞砸了。

And I think we have a chance with this new computing technology meeting people in the eighties—the fact that computers and society are out on a first date in the eighties. We have a chance to make these things beautiful, and we have a chance to communicate something through the design of the objects themselves.

我认为，我们有机会让这种新的计算技术在八十年代与人们见面--计算机和社会在八十年代第一次约会。我们有机会让这些东西变得更美，我们有机会通过物品本身的设计传达一些信息。

When I was going to school, I had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers. And the thing that probably kept me out of jail was the books. I could go and read what Aristotle or Plato wrote without an intermediary in the way. And a book was a phenomenal thing. It got right from the source to the destination without anything in the middle.

我上学的时候，有几个好老师，也有很多平庸的老师。让我远离牢狱之灾的可能就是书本了。我可以去读亚里士多德或柏拉图写的东西，没有中间人阻拦，书是个神奇的东西，它从源头直达目的地，中间没有任何环节。

更多的中间环节，更多的噪音。

The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.

问题是，你无法向亚里士多德提问。我认为，在我们展望未来五十年到一百年的时候，如果我们真的能够研制出这些机器，能够捕捉到一种潜在的精神，或者一套潜在的原则，或者一种看待世界的潜在方式，那么，当下一个亚里士多德出现的时候，也许如果他一生--他或她一生--都带着这样一台机器，并输入所有这些东西，那么也许有一天，在这个人死后，我们可以问这台机器："嘿，亚里士多德会怎么说？这个怎么样？"也许我们得不到正确的答案，但也许有可能，这让我很兴奋，这也是我这么做的原因之一。

Siri，技术可以把问题搞的很复杂，也有能力搞的很简单，总的趋势是Less but better。

So, what do you want to talk about?

那么，你想谈什么呢？

Steve answered questions at two conference sessions.

史蒂夫在两次会议上回答了提问。

How are these computers all going to work together? They’re probably going to work together a lot like people do. Sometimes they’re going to work together really well, and other times they’re not going to work together so well.

这些计算机将如何协同工作？它们可能会像人一样一起工作。有时候，它们会配合得非常好，而有时候，它们又配合得不太好。

几个翻译软件已经有一些能力上的差异，逐段翻译中可以相互比较翻译的质量，挑选最出色的翻译，相当于几个AI坐在一起相互商量着工作。

What’s happened, there’s been a few installations where people have hooked these things together. The one installation that stands out is at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, for short. And they hooked about a hundred computers together on what’s called a local area network, which is just a cable that carries all this information back and forth. […]

现在的情况是，人们已经安装了一些设备，把这些东西连接在一起。其中比较突出的是施乐帕洛阿尔托研究中心，简称 PARC。他们把大约一百台电脑连接到一个局域网上，这个局域网就是一根电缆，来回传输所有的信息。[...]

Then an interesting thing happened. There were twenty people interested in volleyball. So a volleyball distribution list evolved, and then, when the volleyball game next week was changed, you’d write a quick memo and send it to the volleyball distribution list. Then there was a Chinese food cooking list. And before long, there were more lists than people.

后来发生了一件有趣的事。有 20 个人对排球感兴趣。于是就有了排球分配名单，当下周的排球比赛有变化时，你就会写一份简短的备忘录，发送到排球分配名单上。后来又有了中餐烹饪列表。没过多久，名单就比人还多了。

And it was a very, very interesting phenomenon, because I think that that’s exactly what’s going to happen as we start to tie these things [computers] together: they’re going to facilitate communication and facilitate bringing people together in the special interests that they have.

这是一个非常、非常有趣的现象，因为我认为，当我们开始把这些东西（计算机）联系在一起时，就会发生这样的事情：它们会促进交流，促进人们在他们所拥有的特殊利益上走到一起。

And we’re about five years away from really solving the problems of hooking these computers together in the office. And we’re about ten to fifteen years away from solving the problems of hooking them together in the home. A lot of people are working on it, but it’s a pretty fierce problem.

我们还需要五年时间才能真正解决将这些计算机连接到办公室的问题。我们还需要十到十五年的时间，才能解决将这些电脑连接到家庭中的问题。很多人都在研究这个问题，但这是个非常棘手的问题。

Now, Apple’s strategy is really simple. What we want to do is put an incredibly great computer in a book that you carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in twenty minutes. That’s what we want to do. And we want to do it this decade. And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything—you’re in communication with all these larger databases and other computers. We don’t know how to do that now. It’s impossible technically.

现在，苹果公司的战略非常简单。我们要做的就是把一台极其出色的电脑放在一本书里，让你随身携带，20 分钟内学会使用。这就是我们要做的。我们想在这十年内做到这一点。而且，我们真的想在其中加入无线电链路，这样你就不必连接任何东西--你就可以与所有这些大型数据库和其他计算机进行通信。我们现在还不知道该怎么做。这在技术上是不可能的。

做的明白是因为看的明白，看的明白是因为内心受噪音的干扰很少，容易受到干扰的看不明白-》说不明白-》做不明白。

We’re trying to get away from programming. We’ve got to get away from programming because people don’t want to program computers. People want to use computers.

我们正在努力摆脱编程。我们必须摆脱编程，因为人们不想给电脑编程。人们想要使用电脑。

We [at Apple] feel that, for some crazy reason, we’re in the right place at the right time to put something back. And what I mean by that is, most of us didn’t make the clothes we’re wearing, and we didn’t cook or grow the food that we eat, and we’re speaking a language that was developed by other people, and we use a mathematics that was developed by other people. We are constantly taking.And the ability to put something back into the pool of human experience is extremely neat. I think that everyone knows that in the next ten years we have the chance to really do that. And we [will] look back—and while we’re doing it, it’s pretty fun, too—we will look back and say, “God, we were a part of that!”

我们（在苹果公司）觉得，出于某种疯狂的原因，我们在正确的时间出现在正确的地点，可以做些事情来回报社会。我的意思是，我们穿的衣服不是我们自己做的，我们吃的食物不是我们自己做的，我们说的语言是别人发明的，我们用的数学也是别人发明的。我们在不断索取。而将某些东西放回人类经验池中的能力则是非常了不起的。我想每个人都知道，在未来的十年里，我们有机会真正做到这一点。当我们回首往事时，我们会说："天哪，我们也参与其中了！"而我们在做这件事的时候，也会觉得非常有趣。

这段关于使命的描述贯穿乔布斯的一生。

We started with nothing. So whenever you start with nothing, you can always shoot for the moon. You have nothing to lose. And the thing that happens is—when you sort of get something, it’s very easy to go into cover-your-ass mode, and then you become conservative and vote for Ronnie. So what we’re trying to do is to realize the very amazing time that we’re in and not go into that mode.

我们白手起家。所以，无论何时，只要你白手起家，你就可以向月亮开枪。你不会有任何损失。而发生的事情是，当你得到一些东西的时候，很容易进入掩护你的屁股模式，然后你就会变得保守，投票给罗尼。因此，我们要做的就是意识到我们所处的时代非常奇妙，不要进入那种模式。

I can’t tell you why you need a home computer right now. I mean, people ask me, “Why should I buy a computer in my home?”

我无法告诉你为什么你现在需要一台家用电脑。我是说，人们问我 "为什么要在家里买电脑？"

And I say, “Well, to learn about it, to run some fun simulations. If you’ve got some kids, they should probably know about it in terms of literacy. They can probably get some good educational software, especially if they’re younger.

我说："好吧，了解一下，做一些有趣的模拟。如果你有孩子，他们也许应该从识字的角度了解它。他们也许可以得到一些很好的教育软件，尤其是如果他们比较年轻的话。

“You can hook up to the source and, you know, do whatever you’re going to do. Meet women, I don’t know. But other than that, there’s no good reason to buy one for your house right now. But there will be. There will be.”

"你可以连接到信号源，你知道，做你想做的任何事。认识女人，我不知道。但除此之外，现在还没有很好的理由在家里买一个。但会有的。会有的。"

I don’t think finance is what drives people at Apple. I don’t think it’s money, but feeling like you own a piece of the company, and this is your damn company, and if you see something … We always tell people, “You work for Apple first and your boss second.” We feel pretty strongly about that.

我不认为财务是苹果公司员工的动力。我不认为是钱，而是感觉自己拥有公司的一部分，这是你的公司，如果你看到什么......我们总是告诉人们，"你首先为苹果工作，其次才是你的老板"。我们对此深有感触。

When you have a million people using something, then that’s when creativity really starts to happen on a very rapid scale. […] We need some revolutions like [the] Lisa [computer], but we also then need to get millions of units out there and let the world innovate—because the world’s pretty good at innovating, we’ve found.

当有一百万人使用某件东西时，创造力才真正开始以非常快的速度出现。[......]我们需要一些像[丽莎][电脑]这样的革命，但我们也需要让数百万人使用，让全世界都来创新--因为我们发现，全世界都非常善于创新。

On the Macintosh

在 Macintosh 上

Macintosh was less than a year old—but clearly poised to transform the personal computer industry—when Steve reflected on its significance with reporter David Sheff.

当史蒂夫与记者大卫-谢夫（David Sheff）回顾 Macintosh 的意义时，Macintosh 推出还不到一年，但显然已经做好了改变个人电脑行业的准备。

One of the things I love is that with Macintosh, you can write memos that are Times Roman or Helvetica, or you can throw in an Old English if you want to have a little fun for a party, you know, for a volleyball announcement. Or you can use a very serious font for something very serious. And you can express yourself.

我喜欢的一点是，有了 Macintosh，你可以用 Times Roman 或 Helvetica 字体写备忘录，如果你想在聚会上找点乐子，你也可以用 Old English 字体写排球公告。你也可以用非常严肃的字体来写非常严肃的内容。你还可以表达自己的想法。

It’s sort of like in 1844, the telegraph was invented, and it was an amazing breakthrough in communications. And you actually could send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. And some people talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity.

这就有点像 1844 年发明的电报，它是通信领域的一个惊人突破。实际上，你可以在一个下午内将信息从纽约发送到旧金山。有人说要在美国的每张桌子上都装一台电报机，以提高生产力。

But it wouldn’t have worked. It wouldn’t have worked. And the reason it wouldn’t have worked was because you would have had to learn this whole sequence of strange incantations—Morse code in this case, dots and dashes in this case—to use the telegraph. And it took about forty hours to learn how to use Morse code. And a majority of people would never have learned how to use Morse code.

但这行不通，之所以行不通是因为你必须学会一连串奇怪的咒语，这里是莫尔斯电码，这里是点和破折号，学习使用莫尔斯电码大约需要40个小时，大多数人永远也学不会使用莫尔斯电码。

So fortunately, in the 1870s, Alexander Graham Bell filed the patents for the telephone—another radical breakthrough in communications that performed basically the same function, but people already knew how to use it. The neatest thing about it was that, in addition to allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing. It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics.

因此，幸运的是，19 世纪 70 年代，亚历山大-格雷厄姆-贝尔申请了电话专利--这是通信领域的又一次重大突破，其功能基本相同，但人们已经知道如何使用它。它最巧妙的地方在于，除了可以用语言交流之外，还可以唱歌。它让你的歌声超越了简单的语言表达。

苹果最早期的应用之一，苹果应该有能力顺应变化推出新的产品。

We’re in the same exact parallel situation today. Some people are saying we need to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it won’t work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are slash-qz’s and things like that. Most people are not going to learn slash-qz’s any more than they’re going to learn Morse code.

今天，我们正处于完全相同的境地。有些人说，我们需要在美国的每张桌子上都放一台 IBM PC 来提高生产力。但这行不通。这次你必须学会的特殊咒语是 slash-qz 之类的东西。大多数人不会去学 "slash-qz's"，就像他们不会去学莫尔斯电码一样。

And that’s what Macintosh is all about. It’s the first “telephone” of our industry. But the neatest thing about it to me is, the same as the telephone to the telegraph, Macintosh lets you sing. It lets you use special fonts. It lets you make drawings and pictures or incorporate other people’s drawings or pictures into your documents.

这就是 Macintosh 的魅力所在。它是我们行业的第一部 "电话"。但在我看来，它最棒的地方在于，就像电话和电报一样，Macintosh 可以让你唱歌。它可以让你使用特殊字体。它可以让你绘制图画和图片，或将他人的图画或图片融入到你的文档中。

Even in business, you’re seeing five-page memos get compressed down to a one-page memo because there’s a picture to express the key concept. And so we’re seeing less paper flying around and more quality of communication.

即使在商业领域，你也会看到五页的备忘录被压缩成一页，因为有一张图片就能表达关键概念。因此，我们看到的是纸张的减少和沟通质量的提高。

And it’s more fun. There’s always been this myth that really neat, fun people at home all of [a] sudden get very dull and boring and serious when they come to work, and it’s simply not true. So if we can again inject that liberal-arts spirit into this very serious realm of business, I think it would be a worthwhile contribution.

而且更有趣。一直以来，都有这样一种说法，即那些在家里非常整洁、有趣的人，到了工作中就会突然变得非常沉闷、无聊和严肃，而事实并非如此。因此，如果我们能再次将自由艺术精神注入这个非常严肃的商业领域，我认为这将是一个值得的贡献。

噪音的表现一定是实体化的，脑子是乱的一定会以实体化的形式表现出来。

1983-06-15 Steve Jobs.Speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen

1983-06-15 Steve Jobs.Speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen

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