阿斯彭国际设计大会演讲

原文标题: Speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen

背景: 1983年6月15日，科罗拉多州阿斯彭，苹果推出Lisa电脑五个月后

主题: "计算机与社会正在初次约会"

核心概念

  1. 亚里士多德机器 (Aristotle machine) - 捕捉思想和精神的机器
  2. 施乐帕洛阿尔托研究中心 (Xerox PARC) - 局域网和网络社区雏形
  3. 回馈人类 (Put something back) - 向人类经验之池回馈
  4. Lisa (Lisa) - 1983年推出的图形界面电脑

内容

中文翻译

你们有多少人超过三十六岁？你们是计算机前出生的。计算机三十六岁了。我想当我们回顾历史时，会有一个相当有意义的小切片就在那儿。你们中很多人是电视一代的产物。我很大程度上也是电视一代的产物，但在某种程度上开始成为计算机一代的产物。

但现在成长的孩子们肯定是计算机一代的产物，在他们的一生中计算机将成为主导的通讯媒介，就像电视取代广播，取代甚至书籍一样。

你们有多少人拥有苹果电脑？有人吗？或任何个人电脑？

嗯哦。

你们有多少人用过，或见过，或类似的东西？很好。

计算机真的很笨。它们异常简单，但非常快。我们必须喂给这些小微处理器——甚至是这些巨型Cray-1超级计算机的原始指令是最琐碎的指令。它们从那里获取一些数据，从这里获取一个数字，把两个数字相加，然后测试是否大于零。这是你能想象的最平凡的事情。

但这里有个关键：假设我比这里任何人快一百倍。在你们眨眼的瞬间，我可以跑出去，抓一束新鲜春花，跑回这里，打个响指。你们都会认为我是个魔术师。而我基本上只是在做一系列非常简单的指令：跑出去，抓些花，跑回来，打响指。但我可以做得如此之快，以至于你们会认为发生了什么神奇的事。

计算机完全是一样的方式。它可以每秒执行大约一百万条指令。所以我们倾向于认为有什么神奇的事在发生，而实际上，只是一系列简单的指令。

我来这里的原因之一是我需要你们的帮助。如果你们看过计算机，它们看起来像垃圾。所有伟大的产品设计师都在设计汽车或建筑。但几乎没人在设计计算机。如果我们看看，今年我们将卖出300万台电脑，1986年1000万台，不管它们看起来像屎还是看起来很棒。人们会以如此快的速度吸收这些东西，不管它看起来怎样。而且让它们看起来很棒并不需要多花一分钱。它们将成为每个人工作环境、每个人教育环境、每个人家庭环境中的新物件。我们有机会在那里放一个伟大的物件——如果我们不这样做，我们就会在那里再放一件垃圾物件。

到1986年、1987年，选一年，人们将与这些机器互动的时间将比他们今天与汽车互动的时间更多。人们将每天花两、三小时与这些机器互动——比他们在车里花的时间还长。因此工业设计、软件设计、人们如何与这些东西互动，肯定必须得到我们今天给汽车的考虑——如果不是更多的话。

如果你看看，我们现在面临的情况是大多数汽车不是在美国设计的。电视？音响电子设备？手表、相机、自行车、计算器，你说什么都行：我们生活中大多数物件都不是在美国设计的。我们搞砸了。我们从工业角度搞砸了，因为我们把市场输给了外国竞争者。我们从设计角度也搞砸了。

我认为我们有一个机会，在八十年代这种新计算技术与人们相遇时——事实上计算机与社会在八十年代正在初次约会。我们有机会让这些东西变得美丽，我们有机会通过物体本身的设计传达一些东西。

我上学时，有几个很棒的老师和很多平庸的老师。而可能让我免于进监狱的是书籍。我可以去读亚里士多德或柏拉图写了什么，中间没有任何中介。而书是一件了不起的东西。它直接从源头到目的地，中间没有任何东西。

问题是，你不能问亚里士多德问题。我想，当我们展望未来五十到一百年时，如果我们真的能想出这些能捕捉潜在精神、或潜在一套原则、或潜在世界观的方法，那么当下一个亚里士多德出现时，也许如果他或她一生都带着这样一台机器——在他或她的一生中——把所有这些东西都输入进去，那么也许有一天，在这个人死后，我们可以问这台机器，"嘿，亚里士多德会说什么？这个呢？"也许我们不会得到正确的答案，但也许我们会。而这真的让我很兴奋。这也是我正在做我所做的事情的原因之一。

那么，你们想谈什么？

史蒂夫在两个会议环节回答了问题

这些计算机将如何协同工作？它们可能很像人们协同工作的方式。有时它们会很好地协同工作，有时不会那么协调。

发生了什么，已经有几个地方人们把这些东西连接起来了。最突出的一个安装是在施乐帕洛阿尔托研究中心，简称PARC。他们把大约一百台计算机连接在一起，称为局域网，只是一根来回传输所有这些信息的电缆。

然后发生了有趣的事。有二十个人对排球感兴趣。所以一个排球分发列表演变了，然后，当下周的排球比赛改变时，你会写个快速备忘录发给排球分发列表。然后有个中餐烹饪列表。不久，列表比人还多。

这是一个非常非常有趣的现象，因为我想当我们开始把这些东西连接起来时，那正是将要发生的：它们将促进通讯，促进把人们带到他们感兴趣的特殊兴趣中。

我们距离真正解决办公室连接这些计算机的问题还有大约五年。我们距离解决家庭连接它们的问题还有大约十到十五年。很多人正在研究，但这是个相当棘手的问题。

现在，苹果的策略真的非常简单。我们想做的是把一台极其棒的电脑放进一本书里，你可以随身携带，你可以在二十分钟内学会使用。这就是我们想做的。我们想在这个十年做到。我们真的很想在里面放一个无线电连接，这样你就不必连接任何东西——你与所有这些更大的数据库和其他计算机保持通讯。我们现在还不知道怎么做。这在技术上是不可能的。

我们正试图摆脱编程。我们必须摆脱编程，因为人们不想编程计算机。人们想使用计算机。

我们（在苹果）觉得，出于某种疯狂的原因，我们在正确的时间、正确的地点回馈一些东西。我这样说是什么意思呢，我们大多数人没有制作我们穿的衣服，我们没有烹饪或种植我们吃的食物，我们说的是别人开发的语言，我们使用的是别人开发的数学。我们不断在索取。

而向人类经验之池回馈的能力是极美妙的。我想每个人都知道在未来十年我们有机会真正做到这一点。而（当我们做的时候）——这很有趣——我们会回头看说，"天哪，我们是其中的一部分！"

我们从零开始。所以当你从零开始时，你总是可以瞄准月球。你没有什么可失去的。而发生的事情是——当你有了一些东西，很容易进入自保模式，然后你变得保守，投票给罗尼。所以我们试图做的是意识到我们所处的这个非常了不起的时代，不要进入那种模式。

我现在不能告诉你为什么你需要一台家用电脑。我的意思是，人们问我，"为什么我应该在家里买一台电脑？"

我说，"嗯，为了了解它，运行一些有趣的模拟。如果你有孩子，他们可能应该从识字的角度了解它。他们可能可以得到一些好的教育软件，特别是如果他们年纪小。

"你可以连接到源头，你知道，做你要做的任何事。认识女人，我不知道。但除此之外，现在买一台放在家里没有什么好理由。但会有的。会有的。"

我不认为财务是驱动苹果人的东西。我不认为是钱，而是感觉你拥有公司的一部分，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，其次为你的老板工作。"我们对此相当强烈。

当有一百万人使用某样东西时，那时创造力真正开始在非常快速的规模上发生。我们需要一些像Lisa这样的革命，但我们也需要让数百万台设备出去让世界创新——因为世界相当擅长创新，我们发现。

英文原文

Speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Make Something Wonderful

Speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen

"Computers and society are out on a first date."

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

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.

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.

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

Uh-oh.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So, what do you want to talk about?

Steve answered questions at two conference sessions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

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.

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?"

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.

"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."

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.

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.

思考与洞察

引用此页面的内容
目录
施乐帕洛阿尔托研究中心
回馈人类
亚里士多德机器