创业成功人士访谈录 第8期:比尔盖茨(2)

 　　Now, I was very young.

　　那时候我很小。
　　I was in eighth grade and some of the older students kind of barged in and thought they could figure it out.
　　才读八年级。一些高年级的学生介入并认为他们可以解决。
　　And very quickly, the teachers were intimidated 1.
　　很快，老师们的地位受到了威胁。
　　So, it was sort of a group of students reading the manuals and trying things out.
　　一群学生读了手册，又进行了试验。
　　You would type the programs off-line on this yellow paper tape
　　你可以离线在这个黄色纸带上编程，
　　and then put it into the tape reader, dial up the computer,
　　之后把它放在读带机上，用电脑拨号，
　　and very quickly feed in the paper tape and run your program.
　　很快就可以输入纸带上的程序并运行。
　　They charged you not only for the connect time， but also for storage units and CPU time.
　　这个过程中，不仅仅有连接的时间，同时还需要储存单元和中央处理器运行的时间。
　　So, if you had a program that had a loop in it of some type you could spend a lot of money very quickly.
　　因此，如果你开发了这样一个程序，它将很快消耗掉大笔费用。
　　And so we went through the money that the Mother’s Club had given very rapidly.
　　母亲俱乐部不断地给我们运作经费。
　　It was a little awkward for the teachers,
　　这样的局面让老师们或多或少也有一些尴尬，
　　because it was just students sitting there and zoom—the money was gone.
　　因为只是一群学生坐在那里不断地发出嗡嗡声，钱就花没了。
　　I wrote a tic-tac-toe program and a couple of other base conversion 2 programs.
　　我写过一个“一字棋”的游戏程序，还有两个其他基础转换程序。
　　It was the BASIC language running on this GE system.
　　在GE系统里运行BASIC语言。
　　So, people didn’t know what to think because teachers were fairly dignified 3 in those days,
　　因为那时老师毫无疑问是高高在上的，
　　and usually were supposed to know what was going on.
　　通常情况下，大家都认为他们应该知道接下来应该发生什么。
　　They were okay about it,
　　但那时他们都不知该如何打算，
　　but then when the money was gone,they will start billing us for all of our usage.
　　他们并不反对我们的行为，但是当钱很快被花光的时候，他们开始要求我们付费。
　　We had these funny student checking accounts so my friends and I still stayed very active.
　　有趣的是，我们认识一些对账的学生。
　　We were kind of desperate to get free computer time one way or another.
　　所以我和伙伴们总还是能找到电脑用的。
　　The amount of time we’d spend in this particular room that had the Teletype was quite extreme.
　　我们总是想尽各种办法免费使用电脑。
　　We sort of took over the room, myself and two other people.
　　我们在有终端机的机房里度过了很多时间。我和另外两个人几乎接管了这个房间。
　　They called it the Teletype Room.
　　他们称这个房间为终端机房。
　　We were always coming up with schemes to get free computer time,
　　我们经常想办法免费使用计算机，
　　and eventually did with a local company.
　　最终找到了一家当地的公司。
　　Convinced them that because they had a deal with DEC for this big computer,
　　他们与DEC签订了一个关于大型计算机的合约，
　　an early PDP-10, serial 4 number 36，
　　早期的PDP-10，序列号36，
　　that if they could find problems with it, they wouldn’t have to pay their rent.
　　协议中说如果这个公司可以找到电脑中存在的一些问题，则无需付租金。
　　Having a few of the students, including me,
　　对一些学生，包括我来说，
　　bang on it and try to find bugs 5 seemed like a good idea.
　　真是正中下怀。努力找出电脑中的程序错误看起来是个不错的想法。
　　And particularly, let us do that mostly at night.
　　并且我们的工作时间多集中在晚上。
　　So, we were going down to this...
　　于是我们达成了协议 ……
　　it was called Computer Center Corporation, C-Cubed，in the University District,
　　那家公司名叫计算机中心股份公司，C的立方，就在大学区，
　　staffed by some old people from the University of Washington Academic Computing 6 Center had gone over there.
　　工作人员是一些华盛顿学术计算机中心的老员工。
　　So，for a few years that is where I spent my time.
　　可以说，我在那儿度过了几年时间。
　　I’d skip out on athletics 7 and go down to this computer center.
　　我放弃了各种运动，专注于这个计算机中心。
　　We were moving ahead very rapidly: BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language,
　　我们进步很快： BASIC、FORTRAN、LISP、PDP-10 计算机语言，
　　digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those.
　　从一堆“杂物”中找出有用的操作系统表格并学习。
　　Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys,
　　真的，我们做的不仅仅是像猴子一样努力地找出那些漏洞，
　　but actually studying the code to see what was wrong.
　　我们通常会研究代码，看看到底是哪些地方出了问题。
　　The teachers thought we were quite unusual.
　　老师们觉得我们与众不同。
　　And pretty quickly there were four of us who got more addicted 8, more involved,
　　很快，我们中的4人更加投入，更加痴迷于此，
　　and understood it better than the others.
　　并且比别人理解得更透彻。
　　And those were myself, Paul Allen, who later founded Microsoft with me,
　　这4个人是：我，保罗艾伦（后来我们一起创立了微软），
　　Ric Weiland, who actually worked at Microsoft in the early days,
　　里克韦兰德（开始的时候他也 在微软工作），
　　and Kent Evans, who was my closest friend,
　　肯特伊万斯（他是我最亲密的好朋友），
　　and most my age, was killed in a mountain climbing accident when I was in 11th grade in high school.
　　我们年纪相仿，在我读高中11年级的时候，他在一次爬山时遇到了意外，去世了。
　　So, the four of us became the Lakeside Programming Group.
　　因此，是我们4个建立了湖滨程序小组。