施乐PARC

The Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been established in 1970 to create a spawning ground for digital ideas.

施乐公司的帕洛奥图研究中心--常被叫做“施乐PARC”--成立于1970年，目的是为数字领域的创想提供成长环境。

It was safely located, for better and for worse, three thousand miles from the commercial pressures of Xerox corporate headquarters in Connecticut.

这里距离康涅狄格州的施乐公司总部3000英里，无论是好是坏，都脱离了那里的商业压力。

Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced:

工作在这里的诸多梦想家中，有一位叫做艾伦·凯的科学家，他的两句格言深得乔布斯认同：

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" and "People who are serious about software should make their own hardware."

“预见未来最好的方式就是亲手创造未来”以及“对待软件严肃认真的人，应该制造自己专属的硬件”。

Kay pushed the vision of a small personal computer, dubbed the "Dynabook," that would be easy enough for children to use.

凯推出了小型个人电脑的理念，他称之为“动态笔记本”，使用简便，即便是小孩子也能轻松操作。

So Xerox PARC's engineers began to develop user-friendly graphics that could replace all of the command lines and DOS prompts that made computer screens intimidating.

于是，施乐PARC的工程师们开始研发友好的用户图形界面，以取代电脑屏幕上那些拒人于千里之外的命令行和DOS提示符。

The metaphor they came up with was that of a desktop.

他们想到，可以把桌面的概念应用到屏幕上。

The screen could have many documents and folders on it, and you could use a mouse to point and click on the one you wanted to use.

屏幕上会有很多文件和文件夹，用户可以使用鼠标指向并点击自己想要使用的内容。

This graphical user interface—or GUI, pronounced "gooey"—was facilitated by another concept pioneered at Xerox PARC: bitmapping.

图形用户界面--也就是GUI--的发展，也受到了当时施乐PARC另一个先锋概念“位图显示”的推动。

Until then, most computers were character-based.

那个时候，大多数电脑还是基于字符的。

You would type a character on a keyboard, and the computer would generate that character on the screen, usually in glowing greenish phosphor against a dark background.

你在键盘上输入一个字符，计算机就会在屏幕上显示那个字符，通常是荧光绿色的字符衬上深色的背景。

Since there were a limited number of letters, numerals, and symbols, it didn't take a whole lot of computer code or processing power to accomplish this.

因为字母、数字、符号的数量是有限的，所以这样的显示方式并不需要大量的电脑代码或是很强的处理器性能。

In a bitmap system, on the other hand, each and every pixel on the screen is controlled by bits in the computer's memory.

位图显示则相反，屏幕上的每一个像素都是由电脑内存控制的。

To render something on the screen, such as a letter, the computer has to tell each pixel to be light or dark or, in the case of color displays, what color to be.

要在屏幕上显示某些内容--比如一个字母--电脑就要控制每个像素的明暗，如果是彩色显示的话，则要控制每个像素的颜色。

This uses a lot of computing power, but it permits gorgeous graphics, fonts, and gee-whiz screen displays.

这会占用大量的系统资源，但是能够支持炫丽的图像、字体和惊人的显本效果。

Bitmapping and graphical interfaces became features of Xerox PARC's prototype computers, such as the Alto, and its object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk.

位图显示和图形界面成为了施乐PARC开发的电脑样机（比如“奥图”电脑）和面向对象的编程语言Smalltalk的特性。

Jef Raskin decided that these features were the future of computing.

杰夫·拉斯金认为，这些特性是电脑产业的未来。

So he began urging Jobs and other Apple colleagues to go check out Xerox PARC.

于是他开始催促乔布斯和苹果的其他同事去施乐PARC考察一番。