声音和数据之间的调制解调 —— 电报机和电传打字机如何影响计算机的演变

注：机翻，未校对。

The Squeal of Data

The through line between the telegraph and the computer is more direct than you might realize. Its influence can be seen in common technologies, like the modem.

电报和计算机之间的直通线比你想象的要直接得多。它的影响可以在常见的技术中看到，比如调制解调器。

Today in Tedium: My favorite sound in computing is one that I haven’t actually had to use on a computer in nearly 20 years. The modem was a connection to a world outside of my own, and to get that connection required hearing the sounds of a loud, abrasive handshake that could easily be mistaken for Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. I’d like to compare it to another kind of sound for a little bit—the noise of a “straight key” used for a telegraph. Both technologies, despite more than a century in age difference, seemingly turned data into sound, then into electrical pulses, and back into sound again. It’s no wonder, then, that you can actually trace the roots of the modem back to the telegraph, and later the teletype machine. Data and wires, simply put, go way back. And it’s not the only example of the telegraph’s quiet influence on modern computing. Today’s Tedium draws a line between the modern computer and the pulses that inspired it. — Ernie @ Tedium
今天在 Tedium：我在计算中最喜欢的声音是我近 20 年来实际上没有在计算机上使用过的声音。调制解调器是与我自己之外的世界的连接，要获得这种连接，需要听到响亮、粗糙的握手声，这很容易被误认为是 Lou Reed 的金属机器音乐。我想把它和另一种声音做比较 —— 电报用的 “直键” 的噪音。尽管年龄相差一个多世纪，但这两种技术似乎都把数据变成了声音，然后变成了电脉冲，然后又变成了声音。因此，难怪你实际上可以将调制解调器的根源追溯到电报机，然后是电传打字机。简单地说，数据和电线可以追溯到很久以前。这并不是电报对现代计算产生悄然影响的唯一例子。今天的 Tedium 在现代计算机和激发它的脉冲之间划清了界限。— 厄尼 @ Tedium

Today’s GIF is from the movie WarGames, one of the few films to show off the acoustic coupler-style modem.
今天的 GIF 来自电影《战争游戏》，这是为数不多的展示声学耦合器式调制解调器的电影之一。

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A telegraph key. (Matthew Boyle/Flickr)

The roots of the modem can be found in the telegraph 调制解调器的根源可以在电报中找到

As noted above, the modem, at least in its telephone-based forms, represents a dance between sound and data. By translating information into an aural signal, then into current, then back into an aural signal, then back into data once again, the modulation and demodulation going on is very similar to the process used with the original telegraph, albeit done manually, where information was input by a person and translated into electric pulses, where another person would receive the result.
如上所述，调制解调器，至少在其基于电话的形式中，代表了声音和数据之间的舞蹈。通过将信息转换为听觉信号，然后转换为电流，然后再转换为听觉信号，然后再次转换为数据，正在进行的调制和解调与原始电报使用的过程非常相似，尽管是手动完成的，其中信息由一个人输入并转换为电脉冲，另一个人将接收结果。

Modems work the same way, except no additional people are needed on the other end.
调制解调器的工作方式相同，只是另一端不需要额外的人员。

And considering that context, it makes sense that, for a time, the evolution of data transmission and voice transmission were on a parallel path. You could make the case that, before Alexander Graham Bell came up with the telephone, he was effectively working on a modem of sorts. Here was the problem that he was working on before the first phone call was made: The telegraph system, with its limited communication style of dots and dashes, limited the amount of information that could be transmitted at once. In the mid 1870s, Bell was exploring the idea of something he called a “harmonic telegraph,” which allowed for multiple pieces of data to be sent at once, as long as the sounds being created had a different pitch.
考虑到这一背景，在一段时间内，数据传输和语音传输的演变是平行的，这是有道理的。你可以说，在亚历山大・格雷厄姆・贝尔（Alexander Graham Bell）发明电话之前，他实际上正在研究某种调制解调器。在打第一个电话之前，他正在研究这个问题：电报系统以其有限的点和破折号通信方式，限制了可以一次传输的信息量。在 1870 年代中期，贝尔正在探索他称之为 “谐波电报” 的想法，只要所创建的声音具有不同的音调，它就可以同时发送多条数据。

Bell wasn’t the only one working on an idea of this nature—other inventors were toying with the idea of using harmonics to send multiple telegraph messages at once, including Western Electric founder Elisha Gray—who notably was a major personal competitor of Bell.
贝尔并不是唯一一个提出这种想法的人 —— 其他发明家也在考虑使用谐波同时发送多个电报信息，包括西部电气公司的创始人伊利沙・格雷（Elisha Gray）—— 他显然是贝尔的主要个人竞争对手。

There’s a lot of story in there, including a conflict about ownership that makes Bell look like a thief—I’ll let someone else tell it—but long story short, the concept of the harmonic telegraph being used to send data through electric lines had been overshadowed by the fact that voice could be sent in the same way.
这里面有很多故事，包括一场关于所有权的冲突，让贝尔看起来像个小偷 —— 我会让别人来讲 —— 但长话短说，谐波电报用于通过电线发送数据的概念被语音可以以同样的方式发送这一事实所掩盖。

The idea of improving data transmission never faded, however, and by the early 20th century was improving by leaps and bounds in a more sophisticated form: The telegraph gained the ability to multiplex, or spread multiple pieces of information at once on the same line. This ability particularly proved important in newspapers, which became increasingly reliant on wire services around the country. Per the Encyclopedia of American Journalism:
然而，改善数据传输的想法从未消退，到 20 世纪初，它以一种更复杂的形式突飞猛进地改进：电报获得了在同一条线路上多路复用或同时传播多条信息的能力。这种能力在报纸中尤为重要，因为报纸越来越依赖全国各地的电讯服务。根据《美国新闻百科全书》：

Telegraph news became such a pervasive presence that it transformed journalism beyond the big cities. Many small-town papers increased their frequency to daily production once they received a steady diet of telegraph news. The distribution of news by telegraph also gave rural newspapers an edge in competing with city publications; they obtained news by wire and published it for local readers before city papers with similar reports could circulate in the countryside.
《每日电讯报》的新闻变得如此无处不在，以至于它改变了大城市以外的新闻业。许多小镇的报纸在收到稳定的电报新闻后，就将其频率提高到每日生产。通过电报传播新闻也使农村报纸在与城市出版物的竞争中具有优势；他们通过电报获得新闻，并在有类似报道的城市报纸在农村发行之前为当地读者发布。

Helping with this was a device called the teletype, that could not only distribute messages, but also send them. This idea evolved from the 1869 creation of the stock ticker, which was one of the first devices that used telegraph technology to produce text.
帮助解决这个问题的是一种叫做电传打字机的设备，它不仅可以分发信息，还可以发送信息。这个想法是从 1869 年创建股票代码演变而来的，股票代码是最早使用电报技术生成文本的设备之一。
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A Telex machine. (ajmexico/Flickr)

Eventually, the teletype allowed for the primitive distribution of a limited data set using a limited variant of binary code known as the Baudot code, or the International Teleprinter Code. This five-bit binary code effectively built upon the basic ideas of Morse code and allowed for the distribution of a full character set. It can best be described as the predecessor of ASCII, which was developed from this telegraph code and became the bridge technology for more modern encoding technologies such as the modern Unicode standard.
最终，电传打字机允许使用称为 Baudot 代码或国际电传打印机代码的有限二进制代码的有限变体对有限的数据集进行原始分布。这种五位二进制代码有效地建立在摩尔斯电码的基本思想之上，并允许分发完整的字符集。它可以最好地描述为 ASCII 的前身，ASCII 是从这种电报码发展而来的，并成为更现代的编码技术（如现代 Unicode 标准）的桥接技术。

While not exactly the same as the data that gets pushed through our internet in the modern era, it borrows from many of the same concepts, and the lineage is clear. It’s not the only way in which telegraph/teletype technology clearly inspired computing, either.
虽然与现代互联网上推送的数据不完全相同，但它借鉴了许多相同的概念，并且血统清晰。这也不是电报 / 电传打字技术明显启发计算的唯一方式。

45.45
The generally accepted speed of the teletype network in the United States in baud (or data channel speed). This speed was equivalent to 60 words per minute. Other parts of the world were slightly faster, however—in Europe, the generally accepted speed was 50 baud, or around 66 words per minute. While initially used to communicate directly between devices, the use of teletype eventually evolved into the Telex network, which effectively made it possible to distribute data through a telegraph wire or via the radio. Telex launched in Europe in the early 1930s, and AT&T launched its own version of the network starting in 1931.
美国普遍接受的电传打字网络速度，以波特率（或数据通道速度）表示。这个速度相当于每分钟 60 个单词。然而，世界其他地区的速度略快一些 —— 在欧洲，普遍接受的速度是 50 波特，或每分钟 66 个字左右。虽然最初用于直接在设备之间进行通信，但电传打字的使用最终演变为电传网络，这有效地使通过电报线或无线电分发数据成为可能。Telex 于 1930 年代初在欧洲推出，AT&T 从 1931 年开始推出自己的网络版本。

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The RS-232 serial port, a wildely used computing port that can interface with some teletype machines. (Seth Morabito/Flickr)

The teletype directly influenced early computer connectivity and an iconic operating system 电传打字机直接影响了早期的计算机连接和标志性的操作系统

When people were plugging modems into their computers for the first time, they were generally doing so through an RS-232 serial port, a port that was effectively a bridge between the past and what was then the present.
当人们第一次将调制解调器插入计算机时，他们通常是通过 RS-232 串行端口进行的，该端口实际上是过去和现在之间的桥梁。

First introduced in 1960 by the now-defunct Electronic Industries Association, was first released into the wild, the RS-232 standard is fundamental to the growth of the modem, as it set out a standardized way for a data terminal to communicate with a communications device.
RS-232 标准于 1960 年由现已解散的电子工业协会首次推出，并首次发布到野外，是调制解调器发展的基础，因为它为数据终端与通信设备提供了标准化的通信方式。

It also set the basic appearance and approach for the serial port, the most common external expansion port before the rise of USB. (The standard is paywalled, but the Internet Archive has a document dating to the 1980s from the National Bureau of Standards that covers the same territory, if you feel like reading details about an outdated technical standard.) 它还设置了串行端口的基本外观和方法，串行端口是 USB 兴起之前最常见的外部扩展端口。（该标准是付费的，但互联网档案馆有一份可追溯到 1980 年代国家标准局的文件，涵盖了同一领域，如果您想阅读有关过时技术标准的详细信息。

But it’s worth noting that RS-232 was designed for the machines that were common at the time of its creation—teletypes, which effectively worked akin to terminals to some degree, except with ink instead of pixels. It’s weird to think about in our screen-friendly world, but before screens were the norm, we used paper, and teletypes were our dumb terminals. (Case in point: When monitors first came out, they were called “glass teletypes.”)
但值得注意的是，RS-232 是为在其创建时常见的机器设计的 —— 电传打字机，它在某种程度上实际上类似于终端，只是用墨水而不是像素。在我们这个对屏幕友好的世界里想想很奇怪，但在屏幕成为常态之前，我们使用纸张，而电传打字机是我们愚蠢的终端。（举个例子：当监视器刚问世时，它们被称为 “玻璃电传打字机”。

The lineage of the RS-232 port is highlighted by what preceded it. Before the first serial port, the interface style generally used with teletypes was something called a current loop interface, which relied on current to push data through wires, rather than voltage, which tends to be the way data is distributed through wires in the modern day. You can actually still buy a converter that turns RS-232 serial signals into current loop signals.
RS-232 端口的沿袭由其之前的沿袭突出显示。在第一个串行端口之前，通常用于电传打字机的接口样式是称为电流环路接口的东西，它依靠电流将数据推过电线，而不是电压，这往往是现代数据通过电线分发的方式。实际上，您仍然可以购买将 RS-232 串行信号转换为电流环路信号的转换器。

(I would pay money to see someone convert HDMI to USB-C to USB-A to PS/2 to RS-232 to current loop and then plug it into a teletype, just to see what happens. That’s my idea of fun.)
（我会花钱看到有人将 HDMI 转换为 USB-C 到 USB-A 到 PS/2 到 RS-232 转换为电流环路，然后将其插入电传打字机，只是为了看看会发生什么。这就是我的乐趣。

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A Zenith Z19 “dumb” terminal, which in some ways was an evolution of the teletype. The device used an RS-232 serial interface. (ajmexico/Flickr)

This kind of relationship between the teletype and the computer also showed itself in another important way—in UNIX, the operating system on which most other modern operating systems are based.
电传打字机和计算机之间的这种关系也以另一种重要方式表现出来 —— 在 UNIX 中，大多数其他现代操作系统都基于这个操作系统。

The structure of UNIX, a piece of software originally designed for AT&T, was directly inspired by the continued existence of the teletype at the time, even though the computer was seemingly designed to replace it. As UNIX evolved into something of a philosophical basis for operating systems, this structure never went away. A 2008 blog post from software engineer Linus Åkesson highlights how deeply AT&T’s legacy association with the teletype directly inspired the operating system:UNIX 是最初为 AT&T 设计的一款软件，其结构直接受到当时电传打字机的持续存在的启发，尽管计算机似乎是为了取代它而设计的。随着 UNIX 发展成为操作系统的哲学基础，这种结构从未消失。软件工程师 Linus Åkesson 在 2008 年的一篇博客文章中强调了 AT&T 与电传打字机的传统联系直接激发了操作系统的灵感：

In present time, we find ourselves in a world where physical teletypes and video terminals are practically extinct. Unless you visit a museum or a hardware enthusiast, all the TTYs you’re likely to see will be emulated video terminals—software simulations of the real thing. But as we shall see, the legacy from the old cast-iron beasts is still lurking beneath the surface.
目前，我们发现自己处于一个物理电传打字机和视频终端几乎灭绝的世界中。除非您参观博物馆或硬件爱好者，否则您可能看到的所有 TTY 都将是模拟视频终端 —— 真实事物的软件模拟。但正如我们将要看到的，古老的铸铁野兽的遗产仍然潜伏在表面之下。

There’s a lot there, too much to summarize, but let’s put it this way: If you write “tty” into a terminal screen on a UNIX-based operating system like Mac OS or Linux, it will list the name of the terminal device being used by the current system.
那里有很多，太多了，无法总结，但让我们这样说：如果你在基于 UNIX 的操作系统（如 Mac OS 或 Linux）的终端屏幕上写 “tty”，它将列出当前系统正在使用的终端设备的名称。

TTY stands for teletype, and the teletype eventually evolved into the terminal emulator—the same one that’s probably easily accessible on your computer right now.
TTY 代表电传打字机，电传打字机最终演变成终端模拟器 —— 现在可能在您的计算机上可以轻松访问的那个。

Beyond the terminal, of course, the teletype made an even more direct imprint on the computer—thanks to an inventor who was trying to get around a monopolistic telecom giant.
当然，除了终端之外，电传打字机在计算机上留下了更直接的印记 —— 这要归功于一位发明家，他试图绕过一家垄断的电信巨头。
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Robert Weitbrecht, showing off his acoustic coupler-based modem. (via [Gallaudet University](https://tap.gallaudet.edu/Presentations/KPStrauss-Doctor Lecture_files/textmostly/slide6.html))

How the needs of Deaf culture—along with the teletype—helped shape the modem 聋人文化的需求以及电传打字机如何帮助塑造了调制解调器

Robert Weitbrecht, who was born Deaf, knew early on of the benefits of technology and how they could help him better connect with the world—and get past his disability.
罗伯特・魏特布雷希特（Robert Weitbrecht）出生于聋哑人，他很早就知道技术的好处，以及它们如何帮助他更好地与世界建立联系，并克服残疾。

At the age of 15, he had built his own radio, which was believed to help him with his hearing and was considered an impressive enough feat that it was featured in his local newspaper. His curiosity would follow him throughout his life—especially through inventions that helped fellow Deaf people communicate.
15 岁时，他建造了自己的收音机，据信这台收音机可以帮助他的听力，并且被认为是一项令人印象深刻的壮举，以至于他在当地报纸上进行了报道。他的好奇心会伴随他的一生，尤其是通过帮助聋人同胞交流的发明。

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Weitbrecht, in a newspaper article dating to his teen years. (Santa Ana Register/Newspapers.com)
魏特布雷希特（Weitbrecht）在一篇可追溯到他青少年时期的报纸文章中。（圣安娜登记册 / Newspapers.com）

Weitbrecht eventually worked his way into a role with the Stanford Research Institute, a university-affiliated facility that played important roles in the inventing of numerous technologies, including ERMA, an early check processing computer I wrote about a while back. Weitbrecht’s role at the institute eventually put him in a position where he invented a device that would prove fundamental to bringing interactive computing into the home: the acoustic coupler.
魏特布雷希特最终在斯坦福研究所（Stanford Research Institute）工作，该研究所是一所大学附属机构，在发明众多技术方面发挥了重要作用，包括 ERMA，这是我不久前写过的早期支票处理计算机。魏特布雷希特在研究所的角色最终使他处于一个位置，他发明了一种设备，该设备被证明是将交互式计算带入家庭的基础：声学耦合器。

Most people may not be aware of this device, which was already out of style by the time that the average person got a chance to get on the internet using a modem for the first time. But the acoustic coupler, which effectively converted audio noises from a telephone receiver into data, was an important evolution of traditional teletype technology, which used a separate network to communicate from the phone system.
大多数人可能不知道这种设备，当普通人第一次有机会使用调制解调器上网时，它已经过时了。但是，声学耦合器有效地将来自电话接收器的音频噪声转换为数据，是传统电传打字技术的重要发展，传统电传打字技术使用单独的网络与电话系统进行通信。

Weitbrecht’s invention essentially made it possible to bring the basic general capability of a teletype machine into homes, where Deaf individuals could use the devices to communicate on the same lines that hearing people had been able to with the telephone for nearly a century prior.
魏特布雷希特的发明基本上使将电传打字机的基本通用功能带入家庭成为可能，聋人可以使用这些设备进行通信，就像听力正常的人在近一个世纪前通过电话一样。

Now, you might be wondering, why didn’t he just create a simple box to do this, rather than going through the additional trouble of an acoustic coupler? That thing added a whole bunch more parts for the simple purpose of making the noises come through an actual phone; technically, it shouldn’t have been necessary, right?
现在，你可能会想，他为什么不直接创建一个简单的盒子来做到这一点，而不是经历声学耦合器的额外麻烦？那个东西增加了一大堆零件，目的很简单，就是让噪音通过实际的手机传来；从技术上讲，这不应该是必要的，对吧？

Well, part of the problem here was regulatory in nature, not just technical. See, at the time Weitbrecht was developing the acoustic coupler, AT&T had a tight grip on the way its network could be used—and legal precedent had not caught up with the available technology. A 1968 decision called the Carterfone decision, which I referenced in this piece about cell phone ringtones, would allow outsiders to make devices for the phone network that weren’t approved by AT&T.
嗯，这里的部分问题本质上是监管，而不仅仅是技术上的。看，在 Weitbrecht 开发声学耦合器时，AT&T 对其网络的使用方式有着严格的控制，而法律先例还没有赶上现有的技术。1968 年的一项名为 Carterfone 决定的决定，我在这篇关于手机铃声的文章中提到了该决定，该决定将允许局外人为未经 AT&T 批准的电话网络制造设备。

But Weitbrecht didn’t have that advantage at the time. Per ‌A Phone of Our Own: the Deaf Insurrection Against Ma Bell, a book about early efforts to build a TTY system, Weitbrecht spent significant amounts of time trying to come up with a solution to the problem that would avoid conflict with the phone giants:
但魏特布雷希特当时并没有这个优势。根据《我们自己的电话：反对马钟的聋人起义》一书，Weitbrecht 花费了大量时间试图提出解决问题的方法，以避免与电话巨头发生冲突：

Weitbrecht faced several obstacles as he set out to develop the telephone modem. First, the telephone modem could not be connected directly to telephone company equipment. The telephone companies were strict about “foreign attachments.” They were concerned that when a customer connected another device directly to the telephone lines, there might be electrical interference with the company’s signals. AT&T’s restrictions on direct connections frustrated Weitbrecht’s attempt to find solutions. He knew that a direct connection to the phone line would reduce garble in the TTY messages. But anyone who attempted a direct connection ran the risk of having telephone services stopped. In an attempt to satisfy AT&T, Weitbrecht spent years conducting experiments with a modem that avoided a direct connection.
魏特布雷希特在着手开发电话调制解调器时遇到了一些障碍。首先，电话调制解调器不能直接连接到电话公司设备。电话公司对 “外国附件” 非常严格。他们担心，当客户将另一台设备直接连接到电话线时，可能会对公司的信号产生电气干扰。AT&T 对直接连接的限制挫败了 Weitbrecht 寻找解决方案的尝试。他知道，直接连接到电话线可以减少 TTY 消息中的乱码。但是，任何试图直接连接的人都冒着电话服务停止的风险。为了满足 AT&T 的需求，Weitbrecht 花了数年时间对一种避免直接连接的调制解调器进行实验。

This led to Weitbrecht’s Eureka moment with the acoustic coupler, which effectively converted the sounds of data, pushed through phone lines, into audio, then back into data. There were limitations in terms of how fast this kind of connection could be, of course—this added step of conversion created a point of degradation—and, for much of its history, the acoustic coupler modem topped out at a mere 300 baud, only later seeing an upgrade to 1200 baud.
这导致了 Weitbrecht 的 Eureka 时刻，即声学耦合器，它有效地转换了数据的声音，通过电话线推送，转换为音频，然后再返回为数据。当然，就这种连接的速度而言，存在一些限制 —— 这种额外的转换步骤造成了一个降级点 —— 而且，在其历史的大部分时间里，声学耦合器调制解调器的最高功率仅为 300 波特，后来才升级到 1200 波特。

Despite the Carterfone decision legally making it so that modems did not need to go through this extra step, the acoustic coupler remained in use for a number of years, in part because connector standards weren’t put into place until the late 1970s. Those RJ11 jacks that you plug into phones today, while invented in the 1960s, did not come into standard use until after Jimmy Carter (who had no affiliation with the Carterfone, by the way) was president and regulatory precedent made something like them necessary.
尽管 Carterfone 的决定是合法的，因此调制解调器不需要经过这个额外的步骤，但声学耦合器仍然使用了多年，部分原因是连接器标准直到 1970 年代后期才到位。您今天插入手机的那些 RJ11 插孔虽然是在 1960 年代发明的，但直到吉米・卡特（顺便说一下，他与 Carterfone 没有任何关系）担任总统和监管先例之后才成为标准使用。

(It’s arguable that the RJ11 connector was something of a prelude to the breakup of Ma Bell—the antitrust suit that eventually led to the “Baby Bells” was taking place at the time the FCC implemented the RJ11 standard.)
（可以说，RJ11 连接器在某种程度上是马钟分手的前奏 —— 最终导致 “婴儿铃铛” 的反垄断诉讼发生在 FCC 实施 RJ11 标准的时候。

在这里插入图片描述
*A teletype machine of the type Weitbrecht helped to popularize. (Sclozza/Wikimedia Commons)

Nonetheless, the acoustic coupler and its attached modem was a revelation, and its speed limitations were not a problem for the original intended use case. Weitbrecht and his fellow inventors, James C. Marsters and Andrew Saks, were able to retrofit old teletype machines to be used over the phone system, creating a new use case for the telephone system that opened it up for use by Deaf individuals. Later iterations came with the acoustic coupler built right in—and some of which are even sold by Weitbrecht Communications, a company, founded by Weitbrecht and Marsters, that to this day sells TTY devices to the Deaf community.
尽管如此，声学耦合器及其连接的调制解调器是一个启示，其速度限制对于最初的预期用例来说不是问题。魏特布雷希特和他的发明家同事詹姆斯・马斯特斯（James C. Marsters）和安德鲁・萨克斯（Andrew Saks）能够改造旧的电传打字机，以便在电话系统上使用，为电话系统创造了一个新的用例，使其可供聋人使用。后来的迭代配备了内置的声学耦合器，其中一些甚至由 Weitbrecht Communications 销售，这是一家由 Weitbrecht 和 Marsters 创立的公司，至今仍向聋人社区销售 TTY 设备。

By the time I first got to use a 2400 baud modem with a computer, this technology was already very mature, and my dial-up terminal programs of the day could actually still technically dial the same teletype machines that saw wide use within the Deaf community. The modem reached that point of maturation thanks in no small part to a couple of inventors who saw a way to extend the life of the teletype in a valuable way.
当我第一次在计算机上使用 2400 波特调制解调器时，这项技术已经非常成熟，我当时的拨号终端程序实际上仍然可以在技术上拨打在聋人社区广泛使用的同一台电传打字机。调制解调器达到成熟点，这在很大程度上要归功于几位发明家，他们看到了一种以有价值的方式延长电传打字机寿命的方法。

Looking at a dim terminal screen, staring at stark green letters or dull gray characters, remains a preferred way of directly communicating with our computers, despite the later success of the graphical user interface and the touch screen.
看着昏暗的终端屏幕， 盯着鲜明的绿色字母或暗淡的灰色字符，仍然是直接与我们的计算机进行通信的首选方式，尽管图形用户界面和触摸屏后来取得了成功。

The first question someone staring at a screen like this for the first time might have is, “What do I do next?” Rarely do we consider the question of “How did we get this?”
第一次盯着这样的屏幕的人可能问的第一个问题是，“我接下来要做什么？我们很少考虑 “我们是如何得到这个的” 这个问题。

Perhaps we should, at least a little bit more. While it would be a stretch to call a telegraph or a teletype the direct inspiration for a world that gave us the smartphone or augmented reality, the truth is that modern computers share more lineage with pre-computing technology than we give them credit for.
也许我们应该，至少多一点。虽然将电报或电传打字机称为为我们提供智能手机或增强现实的世界的直接灵感有点牵强，但事实是，现代计算机与预计算技术的共同血统比我们想象的要多。

We may not discuss our connectivity speed in baud anymore—not when we can measure data by the gigabits per second—but these points of evolution have clearly had an impact on what we, as modern computer users, actually got to use at the end of the day.
我们可能不再讨论波特率的连接速度 —— 当我们可以通过每秒千兆比特测量数据时 —— 但这些进化点显然对我们作为现代计算机用户在一天结束时实际使用的东西产生了影响。

A trackpad is, of course, infinitely more functional than a straight key, but if you squint hard enough, maybe you’ll see the resemblance.
当然，触控板的功能比直键要强大得多，但如果你眯着眼睛看，也许你会看到相似之处。

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