Refer To：《Smithsonian Oral and Video Histories: Steve Jobs》。

Excerpts from an Oral History Interview with Steve Jobs

Founder, NeXT Computer.

Interviewer: Daniel Morrow, Executive Director, The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program

Date of Interview: 20 April 1995

Location: NeXT Computer

Transcript Editor: Thomas J. Campanella, Computerworld Smithsonian Awards

Daniel Morrow (DM): Steve, I'd like to begin with some biographical information. Tell us about yourself.

丹尼尔·莫罗（DM）：史蒂夫，我想先了解一些你的生平信息。请介绍一下你自己。

Steve Jobs (SJ): I was born in San Francisco, California, USA, planet Earth, February 24, 1955. I can go into a lot of details about my youth, but I don't know that anybody would really care about that too much.

史蒂夫·乔布斯（SJ）：我于1955年2月24日出生在美国加利福尼亚州旧金山，地球上。关于我的青少年时期，我可以讲得很详细，但我觉得可能没有多少人会真正关心那些细节。

DM: Well they might in three hundred years because all this print is going to disintegrate. Tell me a little bit about your parents, your family; what are the earliest things you remember? In 1955, Eisenhower was still President.

DM：或许三百年后人们会关心，因为所有的印刷品终将消逝。请你谈谈你的父母、你的家庭；你最早记得的事情有哪些？那时，艾森豪威尔仍是总统。

SJ: I don't remember him but I do remember growing up in the late 50's and early 60's. It was a very interesting time in the United States. America was sort of at its pinnacle of post World War II prosperity and everything had been fairly straight and narrow from haircuts to culture in every way, and it was just starting to broaden into the 60's where things were going to start expanding out in new directions. Everything was still very successful. Very young. America seemed young and naive in many ways to me, from my memories at that time.

SJ：我不记得艾森豪威尔了，但我记得自己是在50年代末到60年代初长大的。那是美国一个非常有趣的时代。美国正处于二战后繁荣的顶峰，从理发到文化，各方面都相当守旧而规范，而到了60年代，一切开始向全新的方向扩展。当时，一切都非常成功，一切都还年轻。在我记忆中，美国在许多方面显得既年轻又天真。

DM: So you would have been about five or six years old when John Kennedy was assassinated?

DM：那么，当约翰·肯尼迪被暗杀时，你大概五六岁吧？

SJ: I remember John Kennedy being assassinated. I remember the exact moment that I heard he had been shot.

SJ：我记得肯尼迪遇刺，我记得听到他中枪的那一刻，十分清楚。

DM: Where were you at the time?

DM：那时你在哪里？

SJ: I was walking across the grass at my schoolyard going home at about three in the afternoon when somebody yelled that the President had been shot and killed. I must have been about seven or eight years old, I guess, and I knew exactly what it meant. I also remember very much the Cuban Missile Crisis. I probably didn't sleep for three or four nights because I was afraid that if I went to sleep I wouldn't wake up. I guess I was seven years old at the time and I understood exactly what was going on. I think everybody did. It was really a terror that I will never forget, and it probably never really left. I think that everyone felt it at that time.

SJ：那天下午大约三点，我在学校操场上走回家的路上，有人大喊总统被枪击身亡。我估计那时我大概七八岁，我立刻明白了这意味着什么。我还非常记得古巴导弹危机，我可能连续三四晚都睡不着觉，因为我害怕一睡就醒不过来。我想那时我七岁，完全理解当时的局势。我认为每个人都感受到了那种恐惧，那种恐惧我永远不会忘记，也许永远留在了每个人心中。

DM: Those of us who were older, such as myself, remember making plans of where we would meet if the country was devastated. It was a strange time. One of the things we're trying to get a handle on is passion and power. What were the early things you were passionate about, that you were interested in?

DM：我们这些年纪稍大的人，比如我，都记得曾经计划如果国家遭到毁灭我们会在哪里集合。那真是个奇异的时代。我们现在想探讨的一个问题是激情与权力。你小时候最热衷于什么？你对哪些事物感兴趣？

SJ: I was very lucky. My father, Paul, was a pretty remarkable man. He never graduated from high school. He joined the coast guard in World War II and ferried troops around the world for General Patton; and I think he was always getting into trouble and getting busted down to Private. He was a machinist by trade and worked very hard and was kind of a genius with his hands. He had a workbench out in his garage where, when I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of it and said "Steve, this is your workbench now." And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. It really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me . . . teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart, put things back together.

SJ：我真的很幸运。我的父亲保罗是个了不起的人。他没有高中毕业。他在二战期间加入海岸警卫队，为帕顿将军运送部队；我觉得他总是惹麻烦，经常被降为列兵。他的职业是机械师，非常勤奋，手艺简直是天才。他在车库里有一张工作台，当我大约五六岁时，他腾出一小块给我，说“史蒂夫，从现在起这是你的工作台。”他还把一些小工具给我，教我如何使用锤子和锯子，以及如何制造东西。这对我帮助极大。他花了很多时间陪我……教我如何制造东西、如何拆解再组装。

SJ: One of the things that he touched upon was electronics. He did not have a deep understanding of electronics himself but he'd encountered electronics a lot in automobiles and other things he would fix. He showed me the rudiments of electronics and I got very interested in that. I grew up in Silicon Valley. My parents moved from San Francisco to Mountain View when I was five. My dad got transferred and that was right in the heart of Silicon Valley so there were engineers all around. Silicon Valley for the most part at that time was still orchards--apricot orchards and prune orchards--and it was really paradise. I remember the air being crystal clear, where you could see from one end of the valley to the other.

SJ：他还涉及了电子学。虽然他自己对电子学并不十分精通，但他在修理汽车和其他东西时经常接触到电子学。他向我展示了电子学的基本原理，我对此非常感兴趣。我在硅谷长大。当我五岁时，我的父母从旧金山搬到了山景城，我父亲因调动而来到硅谷中心，周围都是工程师。那时的硅谷大多还是果园——杏园和李子园——简直就是天堂。我记得那里的空气清澈透明，从谷的一端望到另一端。

DM: This was when you were six, seven, eight years old at the time.

DM：那时你大概六七八岁吧？

SJ: Right. Exactly. It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up. There was a man who moved in down the street, maybe about six or seven houses down the block who was new in the neighborhood with his wife, and it turned out that he was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard and a ham radio operator and really into electronics. What he did to get to know the kids in the block was rather a strange thing: he put out a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker on his driveway where you could talk into the microphone and your voice would be amplified by the speaker. Kind of strange thing when you move into a neighborhood but that's what he did.

SJ：对，正是如此。那真是世界上最美妙的成长之地。街上有个新搬来的邻居，大约离我们家六七户远，他和妻子刚搬进来，结果发现他是惠普的工程师，同时还是个业余无线电操作员，对电子学非常痴迷。他为了结识街区里的孩子们，做了一件挺奇怪的事：他在自家车道上摆放了一个碳制麦克风、一块电池和一个扬声器，孩子们可以对着麦克风讲话，而声音会通过扬声器被放大。搬进新邻里时这种举动有点怪异，但他就是这么做的。

DM: This is great.

DM：这真棒。

SJ: I of course started messing around with this. I was always taught that you needed an amplifier to amplify the voice in a microphone for it to come out in a speaker. My father taught me that. I proudly went home to my father and announced that he was all wrong and that this man up the block was amplifying voice with just a battery. My father told me that I didn't know what I was talking about and we got into a very large argument. So I dragged him down and showed him this and he himself was a little befuddled.

SJ：我当然开始摆弄这些东西。我一直被教导，麦克风的声音需要放大器才能通过扬声器输出，这是我父亲教的。我骄傲地回家告诉父亲，他完全错了，说那个街区的人只用一块电池就能放大声音。父亲告诉我我根本不懂，然后我们大吵了一架。我于是拉着他下来给他看那套装置，他自己也有点摸不着头脑。

SJ: I got to know this man, whose name was Larry Lang, and he taught me a lot of electronics. He was great. He used to build Heathkits. Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You'd actually build this thing yourself. I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one a understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation but maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean you looked at a television set you would think that "I haven't built one of those but I could. There's one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I've built two other Heathkits so I could build that." Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.

SJ：我认识了这个人，他叫Larry Lang，他教了我很多关于电子学的知识。他非常出色。他以前常组装Heathkit套件，那真是太棒了。Heathkit是以组件包形式出售的产品，实际上你花的钱比直接买成品还要多。这些Heathkit附有详细的装配手册，所有零件按照特定方式排列并用颜色标记，你可以亲手组装出整个产品。我认为这给人带来了很多好处：它让你了解一个成品内部包含什么，以及它是如何工作的（手册中还包含了工作原理），但更重要的是，它让你觉得自己完全有能力制造出环绕在你身边的那些东西。这些东西不再神秘——比如你看一台电视机，你会想“我虽然没组装过，但我可以组装一个。在Heathkit目录里有那样的产品，而且我已经组装过两套Heathkit，所以我也能组装电视机。”一切变得更加清晰，它们都是人类创造的产物，而不是凭空出现在你周围的魔幻之物。这极大地增强了自信心，让你相信通过探索和学习，可以理解看似非常复杂的环境中的事物。我的童年在这方面真是非常幸运。

DM: It sounds like you were really lucky to have your dad as sort of a mentor. I was going to ask you about school. What was the formal side of your education like? Good? Bad?

DM：听起来你真是非常幸运，能有父亲作为导师。我本来想问你关于学校的情况。你的正规教育怎样？好还是不好？

SJ: School was pretty hard for me at the beginning. My mother taught me how to read before I got to school and so when I got there I really just wanted to do two things. I wanted to read books because I loved reading books and I wanted to go outside and chase butterflies. You know, do the things that five year olds like to do. I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me. By the time I was in third grade, I had a good buddy of mine, Rick Farentino, and the only way we had fun was to create mischief. I remember we traded everybody. There was a big bike rack where everybody put their bikes, maybe a hundred bikes in this rack, and we traded everybody our lock combinations for theirs on an individual basis and then went out one day and put everybody's lock on everybody else's bike and it took them until about ten o'clock that night to get all the bikes sorted out. We set off explosives in teacher's desks. We got kicked out of school a lot. In fourth grade I encountered one of the other saints of my life. They were going to put Rick Farentino and I into the same fourth grade class, and the principal said at the last minute "No, bad idea. Separate them." So this teacher, Mrs. Hill, said "I'll take one of them." She taught the advanced fourth grade class and thank God I was the random one that got put in the class. She watched me for about two weeks and then approached me. She said "Steven, I'll tell you what. I'll make you a deal. I have this math workbook and if you take it home and finish on your own without any help and you bring it back to me, if you get it 80% right, I will give you five dollars and one of these really big suckers she bought and she held it out in front of me. One of these giant things. And I looked at her like "Are you crazy lady"? Nobody's ever done this before and of course I did it. She basically bribed me back into learning with candy and money and what was really remarkable was before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of re-ignited my desire to learn. She got me kits for making cameras. I ground my own lens and made a camera. It was really quite wonderful. I think I probably learned more academically in that one year than I learned in my life. It created problems though because when I got out of fourth grade they tested me and they decided to put me in high school and my parents said "No.". Thank God. They said "He can skip one grade but that's all."

SJ：起初，学校对我来说非常艰难。我母亲在我入学前教我阅读，所以一到学校，我其实只想做两件事：一是读书，因为我热爱读书；二是出去追蝴蝶，做那些五岁孩子喜欢做的事情。我遇到了一种前所未有的权威，我并不喜欢它，他们几乎完全扼杀了我的好奇心。到了三年级，我有个好朋友Rick Farentino，我们唯一的乐趣就是搞恶作剧。我记得我们交换了所有人的自行车锁密码。那时有个大自行车架，大家把自行车都放在那里，大约有一百辆，然后我们各自交换锁的密码，某一天我们把每辆车的锁都换成别人的密码，结果那天晚上大约十点钟大家才把所有自行车弄好。我们还在老师的桌子里放爆炸物，经常被学校赶出去。到了四年级，我遇到了我生命中的另一位贵人。他们原本打算把我和Rick Farentino分到同一个四年级班，但校长在最后一刻说“不，好主意，把他们分开。”于是这位老师Mrs. Hill说“我来接收其中一个。”她教的是高级四年级班，谢天谢地，我是随机被分进那个班的。她观察了我大约两周，然后走过来对我说：“史蒂文，我给你一个交易。我这里有本数学练习册，如果你带回家，独自完成（不让别人帮忙），然后交给我，如果你答对80%，我就给你五美元和我面前这件她买来的大东西之一。”我当时看着她心想，“你疯了吗？”以前没人这么做过，当然我还是照做了。她基本上用糖果和金钱把我重新引回到学习中，真正令人惊讶的是，不久之后我对她产生了极大的敬意，这重新点燃了我对学习的渴望。她给我买了制作相机的套件，我自己磨制镜头，组装了一台相机。那真是太美妙了，我觉得那一年我在学业上学到的东西比一生中任何时候都多。不过这也带来了一些问题，因为四年级结束后，他们对我进行测试，决定让我上高中，而我父母说“不行”。谢天谢地，他们同意我可以跳一年级，但仅此而已。

DM: But not to high school.

DM：但不能直接上高中。

SJ: And I found skipping one grade to be very troublesome in many ways. That was plenty enough. It did create some problems.

SJ：我发现跳一年级在许多方面都带来不少麻烦，那已经足够了，确实也造成了一些问题。

DM: This seems like such a good place to talk about your experience in the fourth grade. Do you think that had a major impact on your own interest in education? I mean if there is anyone in the computer industry that is associated with computers and education it has got to be you and Apple.

DM：这似乎是讨论你四年级经历的好机会。你认为那对你个人对教育的兴趣产生了重大影响吗？毕竟，在计算机行业中，与计算机和教育紧密相关的，非你和苹果莫属。

SJ: I'm sure it did. I'm a very big believer in equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcome. I don't believe in equal outcome because unfortunately life's not like that. It would be a pretty boring place if it was. But I really believe in equal opportunity. Equal opportunity to me more than anything means a great education. Maybe even more important than a great family life, but I don't know how to do that. Nobody knows how to do that. But it pains me because we do know how to provide a great education. We really do. We could make sure that every young child in this country got a great education. We fall far short of that. I know from my own education that if I hadn't encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I'm sure I would have been in jail. I'm 100% sure that if it hadn't been for Mrs. Hill in fourth grade and a few others, I would have absolutely have ended up in jail. I could see those tendencies in myself to have a certain energy to do something. It could have been directed at doing something interesting that other people thought was a good idea or doing something interesting that maybe other people didn't like so much. When you're young, a little bit of course correction goes a long way. I think it takes pretty talented people to do that. I don't know that enough of them get attracted to go into public education. You can't even support a family on what you get paid. I'd like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars a year if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year? Is that an intelligence test? The problem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it's not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can't teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It's terrible.

SJ：我确信这确实产生了重大影响。我非常相信机会平等，而非结果平等。我不相信结果平等，因为很遗憾，生活并非如此；如果一切都是结果平等，生活将会非常无聊。但我真的相信机会平等，对我来说，机会平等首先意味着优质教育。也许这甚至比良好的家庭生活更为重要，但我不知道该如何实现，没人知道该怎么做。但这让我痛心，因为我们确实知道如何提供优质教育，我们完全有能力确保这个国家的每个孩子都能接受优质教育，而我们却远远达不到这一目标。我从自己的教育经历中深刻体会到，如果没有遇到那两三个愿意花额外时间陪伴我的人，我肯定会进监狱。我百分之百相信，如果不是四年级的Mrs. Hill以及其他几位老师，我绝对会最终进监狱。我能看出自己本有一种能量去做些什么，可能用来做一些别人认为是好主意的有趣事，或者做一些别人可能不太喜欢的有趣事。年轻时，哪怕一点点的纠正都意义重大。我认为这需要非常有才华的人，而我不知道有多少人愿意去从事公立教育。教师拿到的工资连养家都难以支撑。我希望教我孩子的人足够优秀，能在我工作的公司获得年薪十万美元的职位。为什么他们要在学校里工作，只拿三万五到四万美元呢？这是不是在考验智力？问题当然在于工会。工会是教育领域中最糟糕的存在，因为这并非一个以功绩为基础的体系，而变成了官僚体制，这正是现在的情况。老师们无法有效教学，管理者掌控一切，而且没人能被解雇。这真是太糟糕了。

DM: Some people say that this new technology maybe a way to bypass that. Are you optimistic about that?

DM：有人说新技术或许可以绕过这一问题。你对此持乐观态度吗？

SJ: I absolutely don't believe that. As you've pointed out I've helped with more computers in more schools than anybody else in the world and I absolutely convinced that is by no means the most important thing. The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can. The elements of discovery are all around you. You don't need a computer. Here - why does that fall? You know why? Nobody in the entire world knows why that falls. We can describe it pretty accurately but no one knows why. I don't need a computer to get a kid interested in that, to spend a week playing with gravity and trying to understand that and come up with reasons why.

SJ：我绝不这么认为。正如你所指出的，我帮助过的学校拥有的电脑比任何人都多，但我坚信这绝不是最重要的。最重要的是人，一个能够激发并满足你好奇心的人；机器无法以同样的方式做到这一点。发现的要素无处不在，你根本不需要电脑。这里——为什么东西会掉落？你知道吗？全世界没有人真正知道为什么会掉落。我们可以相当准确地描述它，但没人知道“为什么”。我不需要电脑就能让孩子对这一现象产生兴趣，让他们花一周时间玩弄重力，试图理解并找出其中的原因。

DM: But you do need a person.

DM：但你确实需要一个人。

SJ: You need a person. Especially with computers the way they are now. Computers are very reactive but they're not proactive; they are not agents, if you will. They are very reactive. What children need is something more proactive. They need a guide. They don't need an assistant. I think we have all the material in the world to solve this problem; it's just being deployed in other places. I've been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system. I know this isn't what the interview was supposed to be about but it is what I care about a great deal.

SJ：你确实需要一个人。尤其是就现在的电脑而言，它们非常被动，而不是主动的；可以说它们不是“能动者”，只是反应性工具。孩子们需要的是更主动的东西，他们需要一个引导者，而不是一个助手。我认为解决这个问题所需的材料已经具备，只不过在其他地方正在被部署。我一直坚信，我们在教育上需要推行全额代金券制度。我知道这并不是本次采访原本的主题，但这是我非常关心的事情。

DM: This question was meant to be at the end and we're just getting to it now.

DM：这个问题原本是留到最后问的，而我们现在才开始。

SJ: One of the things I feel is that, right now, if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part. What happened was that mothers started working and they didn't have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids' school. Schools became much more institutionalized and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids' education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control, which is what happened in our country, is that the service level almost always goes down. I remember seeing a bumper sticker when the telephone company was all one. I remember seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell Logo on it and it said "We don't care. We don't have to." And that's what a monopoly is. That's what IBM was in their day. And that's certainly what the public school system is. They don't have to care.

SJ：我认为，现在如果你问教育的“客户”是谁，答案是整个社会，大众雇主等等；但归根结底，真正的客户是家长，而不是学生。这个国家的问题在于，客户已经离开了，大多数家长不再关注他们孩子的学校。原因在于，母亲们开始工作，没时间参加家长教师会，也没时间关注学校。学校变得愈发官僚化，家长在孩子教育上投入的时间越来越少。当客户离去，而垄断掌控局面时，服务水平几乎总会下降。我记得以前电话公司统一运营时，我看到一个车贴，上面写着“我们不在乎，我们无须在乎。”这正是垄断的表现，那时的IBM就是如此，而现今的公立学校系统同样如此——他们不需要在乎。

Let's go through some economics. The most expensive thing people buy in their lives is a house. The second most expensive thing is a car, usually, and an average car costs approximately twenty thousand dollars. And an average car lasts about eight years. Then you buy another one. Approximately two thousand dollars a year over an eight year period. Well, your child goes to school approximately eight years in K through 8. What does the State of California spent per pupil per year in a public school? About forty-four hundred dollars. Over twice as much as a car. It turns out that when you go to buy a car you have a lot of information available to you to make a choice and you have a lot of choices. General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota and Nissan. They are advertising to you like crazy. I can't get through a day without seeing five car ads. And they seem to be able to make these cars efficiently enough that they can afford to take some of my money and advertise to other people. So that everybody knows about all these cars and they keep getting better and better because there's a lot of competition.

让我们谈谈一些经济学问题。人们一生中购买的最昂贵的东西是房子；第二昂贵的通常是汽车，一辆普通车大约价值两万美元，而一辆车的平均使用寿命大约为八年，然后你再买一辆，每年大约花费两千美元，持续八年。而你的孩子在K至8年级大约上学八年。加州每个公立学校每个学生每年的花费大约是四千四百美元，比一辆车的价格多了一倍以上。结果是，当你去买车时，你会有大量信息供你选择，也有很多选择。通用、福特、克莱斯勒、丰田和日产等公司疯狂做广告，我一天之中至少会看到五个汽车广告。他们似乎能够高效生产这些汽车，以至于他们有能力拿我的钱去做广告，让所有人都了解这些车，并且因为竞争激烈，这些车不断变得更好。

DM: There's a warranty.

DM：还有保修。

SJ: And there's a warranty. That's right. But in schools people don't feel that they're spending their own money. They feel like it's free, right? No one does any comparison shopping. A matter of fact if you want to put your kid in a private school, you can't take the forty-four hundred dollars a year out of the public school and use it, you have to come up with five or six thousand of your own money. I believe very strongly that if the country gave each parent a voucher for forty-four hundred dollars that they could only spend at any accredited school several things would happen. Number one schools would start marketing themselves like crazy to get students. Secondly, I think you'd see a lot of new schools starting. I've suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School, they have a public policy track; they could start a school administrator track. You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out of the business school, they could be starting their own school. You could have twenty-five year old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they'd start a school. I believe that they would do far better than any of our public schools would. The third thing you'd see is I believe, is the quality of schools again, just in a competitive marketplace, start to rise. Some of the schools would go broke. A lot of the public schools would go broke. There's no question about it. It would be rather painful for the first several years

SJ：而且确实有保修。没错。但在学校里，人们觉得他们并没有花自己的钱，而觉得是免费的，对吧？没人会做比较购物。事实上，如果你想把孩子送进私立学校，你不能把公立学校那每年四千四百美元的钱拿来用，而必须自己凑出五六千美元。我坚信，如果国家给每位家长一张只能在任何经认证学校使用的四千四百美元的代金券，会发生几件事。首先，学校会疯狂地营销自己以吸引学生；其次，我认为会出现大量新学校。我举个例子，比如斯坦福商学院有公共政策方向，他们可以开设学校管理者培训班；许多大学毕业生可以与商学院的人合作，创办自己的学校。你会看到二十五岁的大学毕业生，满怀理想、充满活力，不去创办硅谷公司，而是创办学校。我相信他们会远比我们现有的公立学校做得更好。第三，我认为在竞争激烈的市场中，学校的质量会再次提升。某些学校会破产，许多公立学校也会破产，这无可争议。最初的几年可能会非常痛苦。

DM: But deservedly so.

SJ: But far less painful I think than the kids going through the system as it is right now. The biggest complaint of course is that schools would pick off all the good kids and all the bad kids would be left to wallow together in either a private school or remnants of a public school system. To me that's like saying "Well, all the car manufacturers are going to make BMWs and Mercedes and nobody's going to make a ten thousand dollar car." I think the most hotly competitive market right now is the ten thousand dollar car area. You've got all the Japanese playing in it. You've got General Motors who spent five million dollars subsidizing Saturn to compete in that market. You've got Ford which has just introduced two new cars in that market. You've got Chrysler with the Neon.

SJ：但我认为这比孩子们现在在现行体制下所经历的痛苦要小得多。最大的抱怨当然是，学校会挑选所有优秀的孩子，而把所有较差的孩子留在一起，无论是在私立学校还是在公立学校的残留系统中。对我来说，这就像说“所有汽车制造商都只会制造宝马和奔驰，没人会制造一辆一万美元的车。”我认为现在竞争最激烈的市场是那种一万美元的车市场。所有日本品牌都在竞争，通用汽车花了五百万美元补贴Saturn来竞争，福特刚刚推出了两款新车，而克莱斯勒则有Neon车型。

DM: So you're spending thirty-two thousand and getting a five hundred dollar car in some cases.

DM：所以在某些情况下，你花了三万两千美元，却只能买到一辆五百美元的车？

SJ: The market competition model seems to indicate that where there is a need there is a lot of providers willing to tailor their products to fit that need and a lot of competition which forces them to get better and better. I used to think when I was in my twenties that technology was the solution to most of the world's problems, but unfortunately it just ain't so. I'll give you an analogy. Alot of times we think "Why is the television programming so bad? Why are television shows so demeaning, so poor?" The first thought that occurs to you is "Well, there is a conspiracy: the networks are feeding us this slop because its cheap to produce. It's the networks that are controlling this and they are feeding us this stuff but the truth of the matter, if you study it in any depth, is that networks absolutely want to give people what they want so that will watch the shows. If people wanted something different, they would get it. And the truth of the matter is that the shows that are on television, are on television because that's what people want. The majority of people in this country want to turn on a television and turn off their brain and that's what they get. And that's far more depressing than a conspiracy. Conspiracies are much more fun than the truth of the matter, which is that the vast majority of the public are pretty mindless most of the time. I think the school situation has a parallel here when it comes to technology. It is so much more hopeful to think that technology can solve the problems that are more human and more organizational and more political in nature, and it ain't so. We need to attack these things at the root, which is people and how much freedom we give people, the competition that will attract the best people. Unfortunately, there are side effects, like pushing out a lot of 46 year old teachers who lost their spirit fifteen years ago and shouldn't be teaching anymore. I feel very strongly about this. I wish it was as simple as giving it over to the computer.

SJ：市场竞争模式似乎表明，只要有需求，就会有大量供应商愿意定制他们的产品以满足这种需求，激烈的竞争迫使他们不断改进。我曾在二十多岁时认为技术能解决世界上大部分问题，但不幸的是事实并非如此。举个例子，我们常常会问“为什么电视节目这么糟糕？为什么电视节目如此轻蔑、如此劣质？”你脑海中首先想到的可能是“这一定是个阴谋：电视网络因为生产便宜而灌输这种垃圾，是它们在控制一切”，但实际上，如果你深入研究，会发现电视网络绝对想给人们他们想要的节目，所以人们会看节目。如果人们想要不同的东西，他们会得到的。事实是电视节目之所以存在，是因为那正是人们所想要的。这个国家的大多数人只想打开电视，关闭大脑，而这正是他们得到的。这比阴谋论要令人沮丧得多。阴谋论虽然更有趣，但事实是大多数公众大部分时间都相当麻木。我认为学校的问题在技术领域也有类似之处。人们天真地认为技术能解决那些更具人性、更具组织性、更具政治性的问题，但事实并非如此。我们需要从根本上解决这些问题，也就是关注人本身，以及我们给予人们多少自由和通过竞争吸引最优秀的人。不幸的是，这也会带来副作用，比如淘汰那些46岁、15年前就失去了热情、已经不该再教书的教师。我对此感触颇深。我真希望事情能像交给电脑那样简单。

DM: I'm really glad we had a chance to talk about it. To talk about other things, so much has been written about you rather than go over a lot of those stories I was going to ask which one you think is the best and the fairest and if there are aspects of your career that you think have been left out.

DM：我很高兴我们有机会谈论这些。关于你，已经有太多文章了，我本来打算问你认为哪一个故事最精彩、最公正，以及你觉得自己职业生涯中哪些方面被遗漏了。

SJ: I have to tell you truly that I'm pretty ignorant about it because I haven't read any of them. I skimmed one one time and read the first ten pages and they got my birthday wrong by a year. If they can't even get this right then this is probably not worth reading. I don't even remember the name of the one I skimmed. I always considered part of my job was to keep the quality level of people in the organizations I work with very high. That's what I consider one of the few things I actually can contribute individually--to really try to instill in the organization the goal of only having 'A' players. Because in this field, like in a lot of fields, the difference between the worst taxi cab driver and the best taxi cab driver to get you crosstown Manhattan might be two to one. The best one will get you there in fifteen minutes, the worst one will get you there in a half an hour. Or the best cook and the worst cook, maybe it's three to one. Pick something like that. In the field that I'm in the difference between the best person and the worst person is about a hundred to one or more. The difference between a good software person and a great software person is fifty to one, twenty-five to fifty to one, huge dynamic range. Therefore, I have found, not just in software, but in everything I've done it really pays to go after the best people in the world. It's painful when you have some people who are not the best people in the world and you have to get rid of them; but I found that my job has sometimes exactly been that to get rid of some people who didn't measure up and I've always tried to do it in a humane way. But nonetheless it has to be done and it is never fun.

SJ：老实说，我对那些文章几乎一无所知，因为我根本没看过它们。我曾经大致浏览过一篇，读了前十页，他们竟把我的生日记错了一年。如果连这都搞不对，那这文章可能根本不值得一读。我甚至不记得那篇文章的名字。我一直认为，我工作的一部分职责就是保持我所在组织中人员的高质量水平，这也是我个人能做出的少数贡献之一——努力在组织中灌输只聘用“A级”人才的目标。因为在这个领域，就像在很多领域一样，最差的出租车司机和最好的出租车司机之间的差距可能是2:1。最好的能在15分钟内送你横穿曼哈顿，最差的可能要半小时；或者最好的厨师和最差的厨师之间可能是3:1，类似的情况。在我所在的领域，最好的人和最差的人之间的差距大约是100:1甚至更多。一个优秀的软件工程师和一个伟大的软件工程师之间的差距可能是50:1，或者25到50:1，差距巨大。因此，我发现，不仅在软件领域，在我做过的所有事情中，追求世界上最优秀的人总是值得的。当你不得不解雇那些不是最优秀的人时，会很痛苦；但我的工作有时正是要淘汰那些不达标的人，而且我总是尽量以人道的方式来做，但无论如何，这都是必须做的，而且从来都不是件愉快的事。

DM: Is that the hardest and the most painful part of managing a company from your point of view?

DM：在你看来，这是不是管理一家公司最艰难、最痛苦的部分？

SJ: Oh sure. Of course. At times I've been pretty hard about it and a lot of times people haven't wanted to leave and I haven't given them any choices. If somebody wanted to write a book about me, most of my friends would never talk to them but they could go find the handful of a few dozen people that I fired in my life who hate my guts. It was certainly the case in the one book I skimmed. I mean it was just "let's throw the darts at Steve." Such is life. That's the world I've chosen to live in. If I didn't like that part of it enough, I'd escape and I haven't so I'm willing to put up with that. But I certainly didn't find it very accurate.

SJ：哦，当然。有时我确实非常严格，很多时候人们不愿意离开，而我也不给他们任何选择。如果有人想写一本关于我的书，我的大多数朋友绝不会和他们打交道，但他们可以去找那几打我曾解雇过、非常讨厌我的人。我曾经浏览过的一本书就是这样写的，“来吧，向史蒂夫投飞镖。”生活就是这样。这就是我选择生活的这个世界。如果我不够喜欢这一部分，我早就逃走了，但我没有，所以我愿意忍受这一切。但我绝不认为那描述得很准确。

DM: I've got a couple of questions I'd like to ask you about specifically about your experience at Apple. Looking back at the years you were there, what were the accomplishments you are most proud of? Are there a couple of Apple stories you really like to tell?

DM：我有几个问题想专门问问你在苹果时的经历。回顾你在那里工作的那些年，你最自豪的成就是什么？有没有一些关于苹果的故事是你非常喜欢讲的？

SJ: Apple was this incredible journey. I mean we did some amazing things there. The thing that bound us together at Apple was the ability to make things that were going to change the world. That was very important. We were all pretty young. The average age in the company was mid-to-late twenties. Hardly anybody had families at the beginning and we all worked like maniacs and the greatest joy was that we felt we were fashioning collective works of art much like twentieth century physics. Something important that would last, that people contributed to and then could give to more people; the amplification factor was very large.

SJ：苹果是一段不可思议的旅程。我是说，我们在那里做了一些惊人的事情。在苹果把我们凝聚在一起的，是那种能够制造出将改变世界的产品的能力，这非常重要。我们都还很年轻，公司平均年龄在二十多岁末。最初几乎没人有家庭，我们都像疯子一样工作，而最大的快乐是我们觉得自己在打造集体艺术品，就像二十世纪的物理学那样，创造出持久的重要成果，人们为之贡献，然后能传递给更多人；这种放大效应非常显著。

SJ: In doing the Macintosh, for example, there was a core group of less than a hundred people, and yet Apple shipped over ten million of them. Of course everybody's copied it and it's hundreds of millions now. That's pretty large amplification, a million to one. It's not often in your life that you get that opportunity to amplify your values a hundred to one, let alone a million to one. That's really what we were doing. If you look at what we tried to do, it was to say "Computation and how it relates to people is really in its infancy here. We are in the right place at the right time to change the course of that vector a little bit." What's interesting is that if you change the course of a vector near its origin, by the time it gets a few miles out its course is radically different. We were very cognizant of this fact. From almost the beginning at Apple we were, for some incredibly lucky reason, fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time. The contributions we tried to make embodied values not only of technical excellence and innovation--which I think we did our share of--but innovation of a more humanistic kind.

SJ：以Macintosh为例，核心团队不到一百人，但苹果出货量却超过了一千万台。当然，后来大家纷纷模仿，现在已经达到数亿台。这是一种极大的放大效应，约为一百万比一。在你的一生中，很少有机会能把你的价值放大一百倍，更别说一百万倍了。这正是我们所做的。如果你看看我们的努力，我们在说“计算及其与人类的关系还处于初级阶段，我们正处于一个合适的时机，可以稍微改变这一发展方向。”有趣的是，如果你在向量的起点就改变它的方向，当它行进几英里后，其轨迹将截然不同。我们非常清楚这一点。几乎从苹果成立之初，出于某种难以置信的幸运，我们就处在了正确的时机。我们所做的贡献不仅体现了技术卓越和创新——我认为我们做出了不少贡献——还体现了一种更具人文精神的创新。

SJ: The things I'm most proud about at Apple is where the technical and the humanistic came together, as it did in publishing for example. The Macintosh basically revolutionized publishing and printing. The typographic artistry coupled with the technical understanding and excellence to implement that electronically--those two things came together and empowered people to use the computer without having to understand arcane computer commands. It was the combination of those two things that I'm the most proud of. It happened on the Apple II and it happened on the Lisa, although there were other problems with the Lisa that caused it to be a market failure; and then it happened again big time on the Macintosh.

SJ：我在苹果最自豪的事情，是技术与人文精神的融合，就像在出版领域那样。Macintosh基本上彻底革新了出版和印刷业。排版艺术与将其以电子方式实现的技术理解和卓越相结合——这两者结合在一起，使人们能够使用电脑而无需理解那些晦涩的电脑命令。这种结合正是我最自豪的地方。它先后在苹果II和Lisa上出现过，尽管Lisa由于其他问题而市场失败；随后在Macintosh上又大幅实现了这一点。

DM: You used an interesting word in describing what you were doing. You were talking about art not engineering, not science. Tell me about that.

DM：你在描述你的工作时用了一个有趣的词。你谈论的是艺术，而非工程，也不是科学。请谈谈这方面。

SJ: I actually think there's actually very little distinction between an artist and a scientist or engineer of the highest calibre. I've never had a distinction in my mind between those two types of people. They've just been to me people who pursue different paths but basically kind of headed to the same goal which is to express something of what they perceive to be the truth around them so that others can benefit by it.

SJ：我其实认为，最高水平的艺术家与科学家或工程师之间几乎没有区别。在我看来，我从未将这两类人区分开来。他们只是走着不同的道路，但基本上都朝着同一个目标努力，那就是表达他们所感知到的真理，让别人从中受益。

DM: And the artistry is in the elegance of the solution, like chess playing or mathematics?

DM：那么这种艺术性体现在解决方案的优雅上吗，就像下棋或数学那样？

SJ: No. I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don't have that insight so they can get some of the advantage of that insight that makes them feel a certain way or allows them to do a certain thing. I think that a lot of the folks on the Macintosh team were capable of doing that and did exactly that. If you study these people a little bit more what you'll find is that in this particular time, in the 70's and the 80's the best people in computers would have normally been poets and writers and musicians. Almost all of them were musicians. A lot of them were poets on the side. They went into computers because it was so compelling. It was fresh and new. It was a new medium of expression for their creative talents. The feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or a painter. Many of the people were introspective, inward people who expressed how they felt about other people or the rest of humanity in general into their work, work that other people would use. People put a lot of love into these products, and a lot of expression of their appreciation came to these things. It's hard to explain.

SJ：不，我认为艺术性在于对周围事物的深刻洞察。通常是以一种别人从未尝试过的方式把事物组合在一起，并找到一种方法向那些没有这种洞察力的人表达，从而让他们也能获得那种感受或者能够做某件事。我认为Macintosh团队中的许多人正是具备并实现了这种能力。如果你更仔细地研究这些人，你会发现，在70年代和80年代，计算机领域最优秀的人本来往往是诗人、作家和音乐家，几乎全都是音乐家，很多人还兼职写诗。他们进入计算机领域是因为那实在太吸引人，新鲜而独特，是他们展现创意才能的新媒介。人们在其中投入的情感和热情，与诗人或画家完全无异。许多人内省、内向，把自己对他人或整个人类的感受融入到他们的作品中，而这些作品正是供别人使用的。人们对这些产品倾注了大量的爱，而这种感激之情也充分体现出来。这真的难以形容。

DM: It's passion in the truest sense of the word.

DM：这是真正意义上的激情。

SJ: The computer industry is at a very critical juncture where those people are clearly leaving the field.

SJ：计算机行业正处于一个非常关键的转折点，那些才华横溢的人显然正在离开这个领域。

DM: What are they doing?

DM：他们在做什么呢？

SJ: Hard to say. They're not being attracted by something else. They're being driven out of the computer business. They're being driven out because the computer business is becoming a monopoly with Microsoft. Without getting into whether Microsoft gained its position legally or not--who cares? The end product of the position is that the ability to innovate in the industry is being sucked dry. I think the smartest people have already seen the writing on the wall. I think some of the smartest young people are questioning whether they'll really get in it. Hopefully things will change. It's kind of a dark period right now or about to enter.

SJ：很难说。他们不是被其他东西吸引，而是被迫退出计算机行业。之所以被迫退出，是因为计算机行业正逐渐被微软垄断。至于微软是否合法获得这种地位——谁在乎呢？最终的结果就是，行业的创新能力正被榨干。我认为最聪明的人已经看到了前景，有些最聪明的年轻人正在质疑自己是否真的应该进入这个领域。希望情况会改变，现在或即将进入一个相当黑暗的时期。

DM: Apple had a reputation as a company that absolutely broke the mold and set its own course. Looking back from where you are today with NeXT, do you think that, as Apple grew larger, it could have sustained that original approach? Or was it destined to become a big standard American company?

DM：苹果曾以打破常规、走自己路而著称。从你现在在NeXT的角度回顾，你认为随着苹果变大，它能否保持最初的方式？还是说它注定要成为一家庞大的标准美式公司？

SJ: That's a funny question. Apple did grow big and sustain that approach. When I left Apple it was a two billion dollar company. We were Fortune 300 and something. We were 350. When the Mac was introduced we were a billion dollar corporation; so Apple grew from nothing to two billion dollars while I was there. That's a pretty high growth rate. It grew five times since I left basically on the back of the Macintosh. I think what's happened since I left in terms of growth rate has been trivial compared with what it was like when I was there. What ruined Apple wasn't growth. What ruined Apple was values. John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place--which was making great computers for people to use.

SJ：这是个有趣的问题。苹果确实变大了，并且保持了那种做法。当我离开苹果时，它是一家市值20亿美元的公司。我们进入《财富》300强，排名大约在350左右。当Mac推出时，我们是一家价值10亿美元的公司；所以在我在苹果期间，苹果从无到有成长到20亿美元，这增长率相当高。自我离开后，苹果的增长率与我在时相比微不足道。毁了苹果的并不是增长，而是价值观。约翰·斯卡利毁了苹果，他将一套腐败的价值观带到苹果高层，腐蚀了一些顶尖人才，驱逐了那些不易被腐化的人，并引进了更多腐败者，让他们合计拿走了数千万美元，更关心自己的荣耀和财富，而不再关心最初构建苹果的根本——为人们制造优秀的电脑。

SJ: They didn't care about that anymore. They didn't have a clue about how to do it and they didn't take any time to find out because that's not what they cared about. They cared about making a lot of money so they had this wonderful thing that a lot of brilliant people made called the Macintosh and they got very greedy and instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision--which was to make this thing an appliance, to get this out there to as many people as possible--they went for profits and they made outlandish profits for about four years. Apple was one of the most profitable companies in America for about four years.

SJ：他们不再在乎那个了。他们对如何做到这一点毫无头绪，也没有花时间去探索，因为他们关心的只是赚钱。所以，他们对那台由许多才华横溢的人创造的神奇产品——Macintosh——变得非常贪婪，不再遵循最初的愿景轨迹——即将它做成一种家用设备，尽可能让更多人使用，而是追求利润，并在大约四年内赚取了惊人的利润。苹果曾是美国最赚钱的公司之一，大约四年。

SJ: What that cost them was the future. What they should have been doing was making reasonable profits and going for market share, which was what we always tried to do. Macintosh would have had a thirty-three percent market share right now, maybe even higher, maybe it would have even been Microsoft but we'll never know. Now it's got a single digit market share and falling. There's no way to ever get that moment in time back. The Macintosh will die in another few years and it's really sad. The problem is this: no one at Apple has a clue as to how to create the next Macintosh because no one running any part of Apple was there when the Macintosh was made--or any other product at Apple. They've just been living off that one thing now for over a decade and the last attempt was the Newton and you know what happened to that. It's kind of tragic, but as unemotionally as I can be, that's what's happening. Unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of a hat, companies tend to have long glide slopes because of the installed bases. But Apple is just gliding down this slope and they're losing market share every year. Things start to spiral down once you get under a certain threshold. And when developers no longer write applications for your computer, that's when it really starts to fall apart.

SJ：这给他们带来的代价就是失去了未来。他们本该做的是赚取合理的利润并争取市场份额，这正是我们一直努力的方向。现在，Macintosh的市场份额本应达到33%，甚至可能更高，或许它本可以与微软匹敌，但我们永远也无法知道。而如今，它的市场份额只有个位数，而且还在下滑。那种辉煌时刻永远无法挽回。Macintosh将在几年内走向终结，这真的很悲哀。问题在于：苹果内部没人知道如何创造下一个Macintosh，因为苹果任何部门的负责人都没参与过Macintosh的诞生——或苹果其他产品的创造。他们已经靠那一个产品维持了十多年，最后一次尝试是Newton，你也知道那结果如何。这有点悲剧，但我尽量冷静地说，这就是现状。除非有人能奇迹般地扭转局面，否则由于既有用户基数的影响，公司通常会经历长期下滑的过程。产品一旦跌破某个临界点，情况就会急转直下；当开发者不再为你的电脑编写应用程序时，真正的崩溃就开始了。

DM: There's obviously a lot of emotional attachment to Apple.

DM：显然，人们对苹果充满了情感依恋。

SJ: Oh sure. Apple could have lived forever and kept shipping great products forever. Apple was for a while like Sony. It was the place that made the coolest stuff.

SJ：哦，当然。苹果本可以永远存在，永远推出优秀的产品。曾经，苹果就像索尼一样，是制造最酷产品的地方。

DM: Is there a user of Apple or a story that you could tell that in your mind exemplifies what the company stood for and its values at its best? What customers were using the Apple when you were there?

DM：有没有哪位苹果用户，或者有什么故事，可以说明你心中公司最本真的理念和价值？当你在苹果时，哪些用户在使用苹果产品？

SJ: There were two kinds of customers. There were the educational aspects of Apple and then there were sort of the non-educational. On the non-educational side, Apple was two things. One, it was the first "lifestyle" computer and, secondly, it's hard to remember how bad it was in the early 1980's. With IBM taking over the world with the PC, with DOS out there; it was far worse than the Apple II. They tried to copy the Apple II and they had done a pretty bad job. You needed to know a lot. Things were kind of slipping backwards. You saw the 1984 commercial. Macintosh was basically this relatively small company in Cupertino, California, taking on the goliath, IBM, and saying "Wait a minute, your way is wrong. This is not the way we want computers to go. This is not the legacy we want to leave. This is not what we want our kids to be learning. This is wrong and we are going to show you the right way to do it and here it is. It's called Macintosh and it is so much better. It's going to beat you and you're going to do it."

SJ：苹果的客户大体分为两类。一类是为了教育目的使用苹果产品，另一类则是非教育用途。就非教育用途而言，苹果代表了两点：首先，它是第一台“生活方式”电脑；其次，很难想象在1980年代初期情况有多糟糕。当时，IBM凭借PC和DOS统治了世界，那比苹果II糟糕得多。他们试图复制苹果II，但结果很糟糕，你需要懂得很多东西，情况有点倒退。你看过1984年的广告吗？Macintosh基本上是加州库比蒂诺一家相对较小的公司，对抗巨头IBM，说“等等，你们的方法是错的。这不是我们希望电脑走向的道路，这也不是我们想要留下的遗产，也不是我们希望孩子们学习的内容。这是错误的，我们将向你展示正确的方法，这就是Macintosh，它要超越你，你会接受它。”

SJ: And that's what Apple stood for. That was one of the things. The other thing was a little bit further back in time. One of the things that built Apple II's was schools buying Apple II's; but even so there was about only 10% of the schools that even had one computer in them in 1979 I think it was. When I grew up I was lucky because I was in Silicon Valley. When I was ten or eleven I saw my first computer. It was down at NASA Ames (Research Center). I didn't see the computer, I saw a terminal and it was theoretically a computer on the other end of the wire. I fell in love with it. I saw my first desktop computer at Hewlett-Packard which was called the 9100A. It was the first desktop in the world. It ran BASIC and APL I think. I fell in love with it. And I thought, looking at these statistics in 1979, I thought if there was just one computer in every school, some of the kids would find it. It will change their life.

SJ：这正是苹果所代表的精神之一。另一个方面稍早一些，构成苹果II成功的因素之一是学校购买苹果II；但我记得在1979年，大约只有10%的学校里有一台电脑。幸运的是，我在硅谷长大。大约在我十岁或十一岁时，我看到了我的第一台电脑，那是在NASA Ames（研究中心）。我没有看到整台电脑，而是看到一个终端，从理论上讲，那就是远端的一台电脑。我爱上了它。在惠普，我见到了我的第一台桌面电脑，型号叫9100A，那是世界上第一台桌面机，运行BASIC和APL（我想是这样）。我爱上了它。我当时看着1979年的这些数据，心想如果每所学校都有一台电脑，一些孩子肯定会发现它，那将改变他们的生活。

SJ: We saw the rate at which this was happening and the rate at which the school bureaucracies were deciding to buy a computer for the school and it was real slow. We realized that a whole generation of kids was going to go through the school before they even got their first computer so we thought the kids can't wait.

SJ：我们看到这一现象发生的速度，以及学校官僚机构决定购买电脑的速度，都非常缓慢。我们意识到，一整代孩子在拿到第一台电脑之前就要经历漫长的等待，于是我们觉得孩子们不能再等了。

SJ: We wanted to donate a computer to every school in America. It turns out that there are about a hundred thousand schools in America, about ten thousand high schools, about ninety thousand K through 8. We couldn't afford that as a company. But we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books, a national law that said that if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction. That basically means you don't make any money, you lose some but you don't lose too much. You lose about ten percent. We thought that if we could apply that law, enhance it a little bit to extend it down to Kthrough 8 and remove the research requirements so it was just educational, then we could give a hundred thousand computers away, one to each school in America and it would cost our company ten million dollars which was a lot of money to us at that time but it was less than a hundred million dollars if we didn't have that. We decided that we were willing to do that.

SJ：我们想为美国的每所学校捐赠一台电脑。结果发现，美国大约有十万所学校，其中约有一万所高中，约有九万所K至8年级学校。作为一家公司，我们负担不起这样的费用。但我们研究了法律，发现已有一项国家法律规定：如果你捐赠一件科学仪器或电脑给大学用于教育和研究，你可以获得额外的税收减免。这基本意味着你不会赚太多钱，会亏一些，但亏得不多，大约亏10%。我们认为，如果能利用这项法律，稍加改进，将适用范围扩展到K至8年级，并取消研究要求，使其仅用于教育，那么我们就能向美国每所学校捐赠一台电脑，这对我们当时来说成本是1000万美元，如果没有这项法律可能会超过1亿美元。于是我们决定这样做。

SJ: It was one of the most incredible things I've ever done. We found our local representative, Pete Stark over in East Bay and Pete and a few of us sat down and we wrote a bill. We literally drafted a bill to make these changes. We said "If this law changes we will donate a hundred thousand computers at a cost of ten million dollars to us." We called it "the kids can't wait bill". Pete Stark introduced it in the House and Senator Danforth introduced it in the Senate and I refused to hire any lobbyists and I went back to Washington myself and I actually walked the halls of Congress for about two weeks, which was the most incredible thing. I met probably two-thirds of the House and over half of the Senate myself and sat down and talked with them.

SJ：这是我做过的最不可思议的事情之一。我们找到了当地代表Pete Stark，在东湾，他和我们几个人坐下来起草了一项法案，确实起草了这样一项法案来进行改革。我们说：“如果这项法律有变，我们将以1000万美元的成本捐赠十万台电脑给自己。”我们称之为“孩子们不能再等法案”。Pete Stark在众议院提出，参议员Danforth在参议院提出，我拒绝雇佣任何游说者，亲自回到华盛顿，在国会大厅走了大约两周，那真是令人难以置信。我亲自见到了大约三分之二的众议院议员和超过一半的参议员，并与他们坐下来交谈。

SJ: It was very interesting. I found that the House Members are routinely less intelligent than the Senate and they were much more kneejerk to their constituencies--which I found initially quite offensive but came to understand later to be a really good idea. Maybe that's what the framers wanted. They weren't supposed to think too much, they were supposed to represent. The Senators are supposed to think a little more. The Bill passed the House with the largest favorable majority of any tax bill in the history of this country. What happened was it was in during Carter's lame duck session and Bob Dole who was then Speaker of the House killed it. He would not bring it to the floor and we ran out of time. We would have had to have started the process over in the next year and I gave up.

SJ：那真是非常有趣。我发现众议院议员通常不如参议院议员聪明，他们对选区的反应更为本能——这一点最初让我觉得相当冒犯，但后来我理解这其实是个好主意，也许这正是立法者的初衷：他们不需要过多思考，只需代表选民；而参议员则应多加思考。那项法案在众议院以美国历史上任何税法中最大的支持多数通过。但后来发生的是，在卡特总统的垂死之际，时任众议院议长的鲍勃·多尔阻止了法案在全院表决，我们也没赶上时间，本来必须在下一年重新启动程序，我就放弃了。

SJ: However, fortunately something unique happened. California thought this was such a good idea they came to us and said "You don't have to do a thing. We're going to pass a bill that says 'Since you operate in the State of California and pay California Tax, we're going to pass this bill that says that if the federal bill doesn't pass, then you get the tax break in California'. You can do it in California, which is ten thousand schools". So we did. We gave away ten thousand computers in the State of California. We got a whole bunch of the software companies to give away software. We trained teachers for free and monitored this thing over the next few years. It was phenomenal. One of my great experiences and one of my biggest regrets was that really tried to do this on a national level and got so close. I don't think Bob Dole even knew what he was doing but he really unfortunately screwed up here.

SJ：然而，幸运的是，发生了一件独特的事情。加州认为这个主意太棒了，于是他们找到我们说：“你们什么都不用做。我们将在加州通过一项法案，规定‘既然你在加州经营并缴纳加州税，如果联邦法案未能通过，那么你就能在加州享受税收优惠’。你可以在加州实施，这适用于一万所学校。”于是我们就这么做了。我们在加州捐赠了一万台电脑，还让一大批软件公司免费提供软件，免费培训教师，并在接下来的几年中监控这项计划。那真是太神奇了。这是我最美好的经历之一，也是我最大的遗憾之一——那就是我曾试图在全国范围内推行这一计划，并且差点成功。我觉得鲍勃·多尔甚至都不知道自己在做什么，但不幸的是，他在这里确实搞砸了。

DM: That's a great story.

DM：那真是个好故事。

SJ: That's part of what Apple was about.

SJ：这正是苹果精神的一部分。

DM: On the business side, I was at the Washington Post when the Macintosh was introduced. The Post was an IBM Big Blue Shop and nobody was going to play with it and then the Macintosh infiltrated. There was almost a guerilla movement. It started with ad artists and now the whole front end of the newspaper is being done on Apple machines. Was that fairly common, this guerilla movement?

DM：从商业角度来说，当Macintosh推出时，我在《华盛顿邮报》工作。《邮报》是IBM的忠实拥护者，没人愿意尝试其他产品，但Macintosh却渗透了进来，几乎引发了一场游击式的运动。它起初由广告艺术家带动，现在整个报纸的前端工作都在用苹果电脑完成。这种游击战现象常见吗？

SJ: Actually we had no concept of how to sell to corporate America because none of us had come from there. It was like another planet to us. Unfortunately I had to learn all that stuff. If I only knew now what I know now we could have done a lot better. Our attempts to sell to corporate America were just bungled and we ended up just selling to people who just sort of buying a product for its merit not because of the company it came from. I mean everybody was very hooked on Big Blue back then and they bought IBM. There was that famous phrase "You never get fired for buying IBM." We fortunately were able to change a lot of that. And Apple as you know, I believe, is a bigger supplier of personal computers than IBM.

SJ：实际上，我们根本不知道如何向企业界推销，因为我们中没人来自那里，对我们来说简直像另一个星球。不幸的是，我不得不学习这些东西。如果我现在知道这些，我们本可以做得更好。我们向企业销售的尝试一团糟，最后只是把产品卖给那些单纯因为产品本身优点而购买的人，而不是因为它出自哪个公司。那时每个人都迷恋“蓝色巨人”，纷纷购买IBM。正如那句著名的话：“买IBM永远不会被解雇。”幸运的是，我们改变了很多这种情况。而且你知道，我相信苹果现在是比IBM更大的个人电脑供应商。