在个人电脑成为一个可以销售的成熟的商品之前，便已有理想主义的黑客想要从大财团手中挽救电脑，以用作激进的政治用途了。在美国，最早进行此种努力的是Resource One，这是一群伯克利的计算机专业人员，他们在1970年春柬埔寨危机时走到了一起。这群专业人士受够了政府和大企业对计算机资源近乎垄断的占有，不满的他们开始营造属于大众的信息服务。到1971年，他们已成功地从Transamerica Corporation那里搞到一台退役了的XDS-940分时计算机，并且把它安置在旧金山Market大街以南的Howard Street上Project One的仓库群中，他们希望在那里，用这台机器为政治活动者们编排邮件列表，协调选民调研，并用作一个全功能的社会-经济数据库。Resource One终究没能成为一个伟大成功的项目，部分原因或许在于，在它开始之时，许多激进的黑客们已经将希望转移到了更小巧、更便宜的台式电脑之上，因为那似乎是一个更具操作性的、将信息获取的渠道民主化的方式──假如说信息是激进的社会变革所最需要的东西的话。
But before its demise, Resource One had transmuted into a form of computer street politics; it had become the project called Community Memory. Community Memory's aim was to locate free computer terminals in public places -- like the Mission branch library in San Francisco or Leopold's Record Store in Berkeley -- where they could be used as a totally open, unexpurgated people's electronic bulletin board. This effort was launched by a parent company called Loving Grace Cybernetics. Its title was taken from a poem by Richard Brautigan that captures perfectly the much-prized synthesis of reversionary and technophiliac values.
但在它终结时，Resource One已蜕变成一种计算机街头政治的形式；它成为一个叫做社区记忆（Community Memory）的项目。社区记忆项目的目的是，在公共场所放置免费的电脑终端──比如旧金山的Mission图书馆分馆，或是伯克利的Leopold's Record Store──在那里他们可以作为一个完全开放的，不经任何审查的的属于大众的电子公告板。这一项目是由一个叫做Loving Grace Cybernetics的母公司发起的。它的标题是从一首由Richard Arautigan所作的诗中得来的，这首诗完美地捕捉并赞颂了复古和技术狂价值观的融合。
I like to think(and the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky
我常常期盼
（越快越好！）
在一块电子草地上
哺乳动物和电脑
共同生活在一起
和谐地编程
如水般纯净
触碰清澈的天空
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms我常常期盼
（请就在此刻实现！）
在一片电子森林中
充满了松树和电子
小鹿平静地
在电脑边漫步
就好似
在盛开的花丛中一般
i like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace
我常常期盼
（它必须实现！）
一个电子生态圈
我们自劳作中解放出来
回归自然，
回到我们的哺乳动物
兄弟姐妹们身边，
被那慈爱的机器
照看
Throughout the later seventies, many of the inventors and entrepreneurs-to-be of the rising personal computer industry were meeting along the San Francisco peninsula in funky town meetings where high-level technical problems and solutions could be swapped like backwoods lore over the cracker barrel of the general store. They adopted friendly, folksy names for their early efforts like the Itty Bitty Machine Company (an alternative IBM), or Kentucky Fried Computers, or the Homebrew Computer Club. Stephen Wozniak was one of the regulars at Homebrew, and when he looked around for a name to give his brainchild, he came up with a quaintly soft, organic identity that significantly changed the hard-edged image of high tech: the Apple. One story has it that the name was chosen by Steven Jobs in honor of the fruitarian diet he had brought back from his journey to the mystic East. The name also carried with it an echo of the Beatles spirit. And, in an effort to keep that spirit alive, Apple made the last heroic attempt to stage a big, outdoor rock gathering: the US Festivals of 1982 and 1983, on which Wozniak spent $20 million of his own money.
在七十年代后期，发明家和个人电脑行业的创业者一直都在旧金山半岛的各处举行简单的聚会，像是在杂货店的大货桶边交换木柴一样交流高层次的技术问题和解决方案。他们给他们初创的事业起的都是些友善、草根的名字，比如Itty Bitty Machine Company（字符片段机器公司，缩写也是IBM）或者是肯德机（Kentucky Fried Computers），或是私酿计算机俱乐部（美国二三十年代长期禁酒，私酿指当时自酿酒的地下活动）。Stephen Wozniak（苹果创始人之一）即是私酿俱乐部的常客之一，在他替自己智慧的结晶寻找名字的时候，他想出了一个古怪的、柔软的、有机的标识，大大改变了高科技棱角分明的形象：苹果。也有一个说法是，它的名称是由Steven Jobs在一次前往神秘东方的旅行后，根据他从那里带回来的果斋食谱定下的。这个名字和披头士乐队的精神有着关联（译注：Beatles常在一个名为苹果的录音室录音）。而且，为了使这种精神常在，苹果公司勇敢地尝试筹划了史上最后两次大型户外摇滚聚会：1982年和1983年的US Festival，为此Wozniak自掏腰包花费了2000万美元。
For the surviving remnants of the counter culture in the late seventies, it was digital data, rather than domes, arcologies, or space colonies, that would bring us to the postindustrial promised land. The personal computer would give the millions access to the databases of the world, which -- so the argument went -- was what they needed in order to become a self-reliant citizenry. The home computer terminal became the centerpiece of a sort of electronic populism. Computerized networks and bulletin boards would keep the tribes in touch, exchanging the vital data that the power elite was denying them. Clever hackers would penetrate the classified databanks that guarded corporate secrets and the mysteries of state. Who would have predicted it? By way of IBM's video terminals, AT&T's phone lines, Pentagon space shots, and Westinghouse communications satellites, a worldwide, underground community of computer-literate rebels would arise, armed with information and ready to overthrow the technocratic centers of authority. They might even outlast the total collapse of the high industrial system that had invented their technology. Surely one of the zaniest expressions of the guerrilla hacker worldview was that of Lee Felsenstein, a founder of the Homebrew Computer Club and of Community Memory, later the designer of the Osborne portable computer. Felsenstein's technological style -- emphasizing simplicity and resourceful recycling -- arose from an apocalyptic vision of the industrial future that might have come straight out of A Canticle for Liebowitz. He worked from the view "that the industrial infrastructure might be snatched away at any time, and the people should be able to scrounge parts to keep their machines going in the rubble of the devastated society; ideally, the machine's design would be clear enough to allow users to figure out where to put those parts." As Felsenstein once put it, "I've got to design so you can put it together out of garbage cans."
在七十年代末的反文化遗迹中，将要带领我们抵达后工业化的期许之地，是数码化的数据，而不是穹顶建筑，或是生态的、和太空中的殖民地。个人电脑将使数百万人获得全球数据库的访问权，而这──如某些人所说──是建设一个独立自主的公民社会所必须的。家用电脑终端成为某种电子民粹主义的核心组件。电脑网络和电子公告板会保持部族间的联络，使他们能够互相交换权力精英不允许他们访问的重要数据。聪明的黑客会渗透进企业和国家的存有秘密的机密资料库。但没人能预测到这一切。通过IBM的视频终端，AT＆T的电话线，五角大楼的太空枪械，Westinghouse的通信卫星，在全球范围内的熟悉计算机的地下叛军便能以信息组织、武装起来，并时刻准备着推翻以技术官僚为中心的威权。他们甚至可能在高度发达的工业体系全面崩溃后继续存活，而正是这一体系发明了他们所使用的科技。当然对于这种游击队黑客世界观的最有趣的表述之一来自Lee Felsenstein，他是私酿计算机俱乐部和社区记忆的创始人，后来还设计了便携式计算机Osborne。Felsenstein的技术风格──强调简洁和资源的回收利用──源自对工业化未来的悲观预期，而这种末世论可能直接来自A Canticle for Liebowitz。他认为，工业基础设施随时可能崩溃，因此人们应该能够利用破败社会的废墟中残余的部件保证机器的运转；机器的设计应当足够清晰，使用户能够搞清楚该把各个部件安装在何处。这一观点也成为他工作的基础。正如Felsenstein所说，“我的设计应当简单到你可以用一堆垃圾把机器拼出来。”
It is important to appreciate the political idealism that underlay the home computer in its early days, and to recognize its link with tendencies that were part of the counter culture from the beginning. It is quite as important to recognize that the reversionary-technophiliac synthesis it symbolizes is as naive as it is idealistic. So much so that one feels the need of probing deeper to discover the secret of its strange cogency. For how could anyone believe something so unlikely?
认识到家用电脑在发展早期所蕴涵的政治理想主义，并承认它与反文化运动从一开始即有的倾向的关联是十分重要的。认识到它所代表的复古与技术狂愿景的结合，同其政治理想同样幼稚，也是十分重要的。于是，我们也不用再继续探索，以找寻这种结合的怪异逻辑了。因为，究竟怎么会有人相信的这般不可能的东西呢？
参考文献编辑本段回目录
http://article.yeeyan.org/view/firedragoon/166981
