WHEN you are a visionary, it's hard to get other people to see as you do. When you have a plan to save the world through men and computers working together, as Doug Engelbart had, it's hard to enlist the guys at the water-cooler to take part in the crusade. They called him kooky, and laughed at him for doing weird stuff.
当你是一个有远见的人的时候，让别人像你那样去观察世界是一件难事；当你像道格·恩格尔巴特那样，计划利用人机合作去拯救世界的时候，将那些游手好闲之人招募到你的队伍中也是一件难事。对这些人来说，恩格尔巴特就是一个怪人，他是一个常因自己做的傻事而招致嘲笑的人。
In the early 1950s, when he began to get into it all, computers meant serried desks of girls with hand-held calculators.Or else they were mainframes that filled whole rooms, processing data at snail speed on punched-paper tape. He had a different vision, in which everyone had instant access to information on small screens and could collaborate, instantly, to solve the increasingly complex problems the world faced.
他是在上世纪
50
年代早期开始完全进入这种状态的。那时的计算人员是指一排排坐在课桌旁手拿计算器的女孩，或者是指体积有几间屋子那么大、在穿孔纸带上以蜗牛般的速度处理数据的大型计算机。不过，恩格尔巴特不这么看。在他的设想中，计算机应该是一种能够让人们迅速地获取其小屏幕上的信息的机器，它能让人们在同一个时间以合作的方式来解决这个世界所面临的日益复杂的问题。
This was urgent business. But almost no one else seemed to understand. No corporation (not even Hewlett-Packard!) saw the potential in digital computers back then. Colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute, where he went in 1957 as an engineer, told him to forget about them. He poked around largely alone. He sometimes felt like Columbus, whose sailors were afraid of falling off the edge of the world. Or like a creature who had climbed a mountain, seen things coming, but found his hands too clumsy to signal what to do.
但是，当时似乎没有人能理解这是一项紧迫的工作，没有一家公司能发现数字计算机的潜力（就连惠普公司也不例外！）。斯坦福研究所的同事对这个在
1957
年加入到他们队伍中的工程师说：放弃你那些想法吧。从此，恩格尔巴特开始了孤身一人的闯荡。有时，他感觉自己就像是当年的哥伦布，自己手下的水手们都害怕从世界边缘跌落下去；有时，他又觉得自己就像是一个微不足道的小人物，当自己攀登到山顶，看到灾难向他们袭来时，却发现自己的双手已经笨拙得无法去表达自己想要做什么了。
His boldest attempt to make fellow-scientists see as he did came on December 9th 1968. Before an audience of around 1,000 in San Francisco, nervous as hell, he sat in headphones before a console, with his face projected onto a giant screen behind him. The text onthe console was also projected onto the screen, and he began, incredibly, to play with it. Using the NLS online system, his own invention, he opened “windows” and manipulated text directly. A grocery list came up; he added and deleted items, and rearranged it. In another text he created hyperlinks, jumping to different documents. Most astonishing of all, Bill Paxton at Menlo Park, 30 miles away, appeared beside him on the screen, and they moved the text aroundtogether.
1968
年
12
月
9
日，为了让同事知道自己正在干什么，恩格尔巴特做出了最大胆的一次尝试。那是在旧金山，头戴耳机的他当着大约有
1,000
名观众的面，神情紧张地坐在一个计算机终端前，他的脸部表情和计算机终端上的文字都被投射到身后那块巨大的屏幕上。这时，他开始了令人难以置信的表演：他先是利用自己发明的
NLS
在线操作系统，在终端上打开数个“窗口”，随后他又对文字进行直接操作。这时，一个杂货清单出现了；在他对这个清单上的条目进行了增加和删改后，又对它进行了重新的编排。他在另一个文本中创建了一些超级链接，这些超级链接就跳转到其他的文件。最令人惊讶的是，位于
30
英里外门洛帕克的比尔·帕克斯顿也同他一起出现在那块巨大的屏幕上，两个人看上去就好像坐在一起似得，他们一起将这个文本文件移来移去。
What he was using to manipulate the words was a wooden shell on two wheels, held in his right hand, which manifested on the screen as a black dot. He had worked on it since 1961. The lab team called it a mouse, and found it pointed more efficiently than light-pens or knee-nudged devices. With his left hand he worked a chord keyset that gave simultaneous commands to the computer. It was the mouse, though —that little moving bit like a windscreen-wiper—that made Mr Engelbart famous.
恩格尔巴特当时握在右手中，用来操纵文字的工具是一个有着两个轮子的木质小盒子，它在屏幕上显示成一个黑点。恩格尔巴特从
1961
年起就在为这种工具而工作。他的实验团队把这种设备称之为“鼠标”，他们发现用它来指东西要比用光电笔或者其他设备更高效。恩格尔巴特用左手给计算机下达即时指令的那个设备叫做键盘。然而，真正让恩格尔巴特成名的是“鼠标”——那个活动起来有点像挡风玻璃的刮水器的东西。。
And that wasn't the point, for him. The mouse was merely a tool to build the thrilling universe he had just demonstrated, in which computers were harnessed to make people think and work faster, more effectively and more collectively. In short, the augmentation of human intellect for the good of the whole human race.
但是，对恩格尔巴特来说，鼠标不是关键所在。在他刚刚演示的那个令人动心的宇宙中，鼠标只是一种用来构建这个宇宙的工具；而计算机则可以用来提高人们思维和工作的速度，它可以让工作更高效，更具有团队性。总之，计算机可以提升人类的智力，它能为整个人类带来好处。
At SRI in the early 1960s he set up his own Augmentation Research Centre funded by ARPA, a military-research outfit. In 1969 the first internet link connected UCLA right to ARC. “Scouting parties” of computer- users were recruited for his greater goal, that new interface between men and machines. He wasn't much of a salesman for it: still the shy farm boy from Oregon with cowshit on his shoes, and the unassuming trick-bike-rider who had met his wife at a folk-dancing class. But he believed.
在上世纪
60
年代早期于斯坦福研究所工作期间，恩格尔巴特在军方研究机构
ARPA
的资助下，建立起了自己的“扩展研究中心”（
ARC
）。
1969
年，恩格尔巴特在
UCLA
与
ARC
之间建立了第一条互联网连接。此时，他为自己制定了一个更大的目标，他准备在人类与机器之间构建一个新的界面。为此，他招募了一批计算机“童子军”。恩格尔巴特不是一个会推销自己想法的人：他还是那个鞋子上沾有牛粪的、腼腆的俄勒冈州农场男孩，他还是那个不爱出风头的、在一次民间舞蹈课上结识了自己妻子的魔术自行车骑手。但是，他是一个有信仰的人。
He had been on that vector, as he thought of it, for a while, ever since watching the speed with which pulses flickered on to radar screens when he was in the navy. Soon after that he had read an article called “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, imagining a future in which everyone's own library of memories, books and memoranda was instantly retrievable on a desktop screen, rather than in the little notebooks he carriedin his top shirt pocket. Humans could change. The symbols and concepts they used to map the world could be rearranged in new, extraordinary ways—by computers. Human intuition could be combined for the common with breathtaking technical power.
自从他在海军服役时看到脉冲投射到雷达屏幕上的速度之时起，就对那种他认为的那种向量痴迷了好长一段时间。他在阅读了
Vannevar Bush
的《我们可以这样思考》一文后不久，就设想出了一个这样的未来：每个人都能将自己的回忆录、书籍和备忘录变成显示在计算机屏幕上的可以检索的图书馆，从此人们就再也不用把这些东西写在小本子上，放到上衣口袋里到处带着了。人类能够变革。人们可以利用计算机将过去用来绘制世界的符号和概念进行重新编排。人类可以为了共同的利益，利用巨大的技术力量去梳理自己的直觉。
