2016-4-7

A new age makes large demands. At Bell Labs, it required the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists and engineers over many decades—millions of “man-hours,” in the parlance of AT&T, which made a habit of calculating its employees’ toil to a degree that made its workers proud while also keeping the U.S. government (which closely monitored the company’s business practices and long-distance phone monopoly) at bay.

為了滿足新時代人們對通訊的大量的要求，根據美國電話電報公司(AT&T)報告，成千上萬的科學家和工程師在貝爾實驗室的努力在數十年，等價于近百萬“工時”的開發歷程,這使得計算員工辛勞的習慣在一定程度上讓員工自豪的同時也讓美國政府(密切關注公司的業務實踐和長途電話壟斷)。

For reasons that are conceptual as well as practical, this book does not focus on those tens of thousands of Bell Laboratories workers.?

無論從概念上還是實際細節上，這本書不對那些成千上萬的貝爾實驗室工人做詳細的描述。

Instead, it looks primarily at the lives of a select and representative few: Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and William Baker. Some of these names are notorious—Shockley, for instance, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 and in his later years steadfastly pursued a scientific link between race and intelligence.

文中講選擇其中具有鮮活代表的人物進行講述:默文·凱利,吉姆?Fisk威廉·肖克利克勞德·香農,約翰?皮爾斯和威廉·貝克、notorious-Shockley,例如,1956年獲得了諾貝爾物理學獎,晚年堅決推崇科學種族與智力的關系。

Others, such as Shannon, are familiar to those within a certain area of interest (in Shannon’s case, mathematics and artificial intelligence) while remaining largely unknown to the general public. Pierce, a nearly forgotten figure, was the father of satellite communications and an instigator of more ideas than can be properly accounted for here. Kelly, Fisk, and Baker were presidents of the Labs, and served as stewards during the institution’s golden age.?

其他人,如香農,熟悉里面的某一個感興趣的領域(在香農的情況下,數學和人工智能),而很大程度上是未知的公眾。皮爾斯,一個幾乎被遺忘的人物,是衛星通信的父親和一個煽動者的更多的想法可以在這里正確。凱利,國庫,貝克總統的實驗室,并擔任干事期間該機構的黃金時代。

All these men knew one another, and some were extremely close. With the exception of Mervin Kelly, the eldest of the group, they were sometimes considered members of a band of Bell Labs revolutionaries known as the Young Turks. What bound them was a shared belief in the nearly sacred mission of Bell Laboratories and the importance of technological innovation.

所有這些人都知道彼此,有些關系非常親近。除了默文·凱利,集團的老大,他們有時認為是貝爾實驗室的一個樂隊的成員革命者被稱為“少壯派”。綁定是一個共享的信念什么近神圣使命的貝爾實驗室和技術創新的重要性。

The men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called “an institute of creative technology.” This description aimed to inform the world that the line between the art and science of what Bell scientists did wasn’t always distinct.?

這些男人們更傾向于認為他們不是在一個實驗室工作但在凱利曾經所謂的“創新科技的一個研究所。“這描述旨在告訴世界,藝術和科學之間的界線貝爾科學家所做的并不總是不同的。

Moreover, while many of Kelly’s colleagues might have been eccentrics, few were dreamers in the less flattering sense of the word. They were paid for their imaginative abilities. But they were also paid for working within a culture, and within an institution, where the very point of new ideas was to make them into new things.

此外,雖然許多凱利的同事可能是怪人,很少做夢的感覺不那么光彩。他們支付他們的想象能力。但他們也支付工作在一個文化,和在一個機構,新思想的出發點是使成新的東西。