假如这听来像是老黄历，还请见谅。这个故事我从来没有发表过，而我在想，此时不说，更待何时？

    1982年12月，一大群记者聚集在皮埃尔的会议室里。皮埃尔是一家豪华酒店，史蒂夫•乔布斯日后选择在其南边仅一街之隔的地方，修建了纽约第五大道标志性的苹果巨型玻璃圆柱旗舰店。

    时年26岁的乔布斯在酒店向媒体介绍伟大的Lisa电脑。他卖力的推销这款电脑，尽管（我们后来得知）他已经被迫离开Lisa团队，并控制了另一个绝密项目。

    我当时是《时代》杂志（Time）的记者兼调研员，正处于为期一年的撰稿人试用考核期。我之前听说Lisa电脑和施乐（Xero）帕洛阿尔托研究中心（Palo Alto Research Center）的研究成果有些关联。为了准备这次会议，我提前反复研读了自己当时能找到的关于该研究中心的唯一详实资料——发表在《字节》杂志（Byte）上的一篇有关Smalltalk的长文。

    Smalltalk是一种面向对象的编程语言，由施乐帕洛阿尔托研究中心的阿伦•凯所发明。凯是计算机界的先驱，提出了著名的WYSIWYG（所见即所得）术语，他带领团队创造了第一台可以进行位图映射的显示器和施乐Alto上的GUI（用户图形界面）。施乐Alto是一台由鼠标驱动的电脑。

    乔布斯在不停地炫耀Lisa上他所谓的突破性创新——鼠标、视窗界面、下拉菜单，而我则一直在等他谈谈Lisa对施乐帕洛阿尔托研究中心、施乐Alto以及阿伦•凯的亏欠。但他始终没有提到这些，于是我开始锲而不舍地追问他关于Smalltalk的问题。他终于转向我，厉声说道：“我们与Smalltalk完全没关系。”

    完全没关系？

    我后来得知自己为《时代》写的关于Lisa的文章《鼠标元年》（The Year of the Mouse）激怒了乔布斯。但这不是因为我提到了Smalltalk、帕洛阿尔托研究中心以及道格拉斯•恩格尔巴特（鼠标的发明者），而是因为我披露了苹果已经在大力研发新一代产品：“缩小版的Lisa，称为Mackintosh（为Mclntosh苹果拼写之误）”。（Mclntosh是美国一高端音响品牌——译注）

    后来发现，其实是我自己拼写错了。

    译者：项航

    Pardon me if this feels like ancient history. But this is a story I've never put into print (or pixels) before, and I figured if not now, when?

    It was December 1982 and a crowd of journalists had gathered in a meeting room at The Pierre, a luxury hotel one block north of the site Steve Jobs would later choose for the Fifth Avenue Apple Store's big glass cube.

    Jobs, then 26, was there to introduce the media to the wonders of the Lisa. He was selling it hard, even though (we later learned) he'd already been forced off the Lisa team and had seized control of a second, top-secret project.

    I was a reporter-researcher at Time magazine on a 12-month probationary writer's trial. I'd heard that the Lisa had something to do with work done at Xerox's (XRX) Palo Alto Research Center, and to prep for the meeting I had read and re-read the only substantive story I could find about Xerox PARC -- a long article in Byte magazine on Smalltalk.

    Smalltalk was an object-oriented programming language created at PARC by Alan Kay -- the computing pioneer who coined the term WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and led the team that created the first bit-mapped display and GUI (graphical user interface) on the mouse-driven Xerox Alto.

    As Jobs showed off what he described as Lisa's breakthrough innovations -- the mouse, the windows, the pull-down menus -- I waited for him to say something about Lisa's debt to Xerox PARC, the Alto and Alan Kay. When he didn't, I started pestering him with questions about Smalltalk. He finally turned to me and snapped "This has nothing to do with Smalltalk."

    Nothing?

    I found out later that the story I wrote for Time about Lisa -- The Year of the Mouse -- infuriated Jobs. Not because it mentioned Smalltalk, PARC and Douglas Engelbart (the inventor of the mouse), but because it reported that Apple (AAPL) was already hard at work on its successor: "a scaled-down version of Lisa called Mackintosh (a misspelling of the Mclntosh apple)."

    The real misspelling, it turned out, was mine.