介绍:
Good evening! It is a great honor for me to share this stage with the Lord Mayor, chief executive of Hannover, with Mr. Yang, and in a few minutes with Chancellor Kohl.
各位晚上好！非常荣幸能够与汉诺威市市长、Yang 先生共同出席今晚的会议，非常荣幸能与科尔总理共同度过这个美好的夜晚。
I have been looking forward to this evening for a long time, because I have known for many years how important CeBIT is to the global Information Technology industry.
我一直在盼望今晚的到来，因为很多年以前我就知道 CeBIT 对全球信息技术产业有多么重要。
So before I go any further I want to thank you very much for inviting me to participate in this important forum.
因此在演讲之前我首先要对你们邀请我参加这个重要的会议表示衷心的感谢。
Now I have given a lot of thought as to what I would say to you this evening. On the one hand, I am here as a representative of the Information Technology industry on the event that is bigger by orders of magnitude than any other technology exhibit.
对于今晚要说的内容我想过很多。一方面，我是作为信息技术产业界的代表出席这次比其它任何技术展览会的规模都大的会议的。
That is quite a statement in a industry that is good at many things, especially celebrating its own creations.
我们的工业是一个对很多事情都很拿手 的工业，尤其善于庆祝其自己的创造发明。
On the other hand, like most of you, I have spent most of my professional life as a customer of this industry.
另一方面，和你们大多数人一样，我的绝大部分职业生涯也是作为这个产业的消费者渡过的。
So I know that after the splash and promises comes the harsh light of morning and often the customer is left standing alone wondering what happened, or as the head of one of our most important German customers put it, "Yours is an industry that is very good at weddings and not so good at marriages."
因此，我知道一通承诺之后必将是黎明眩目的阳光。消费者常常被撇在一边，琢磨着发生了什么事，或者象我们一个非常重要的德国客户的首脑所说的那样，“你们的产业好象对结婚典礼非常在行，但对婚姻却不太懂。”
So tonight, while I will talk about the power and potential of Information Technology, I hope the temper of my remarks with the perspective I had when I came to IBM five years ago, the perspective of a customer.
因此，虽然今晚我要谈谈信息技术的力量和潜力，但是我希望我能够象五年前刚到 IBM 时一样，站在消费者的立场上表达我的观点。
Now it is certainly easy to see why raw technology dominates these events. It is adoptive; it is breathtaking; and it is penetrating every aspect of our lives.
纯技术主宰这次展览会的原因是很简单的，因为现在的纯技术是可以被接受的，是令人惊奇的，而且它已经渗透到了我们生活的各个方面。
Today there are more PCs sold annually in the world than TVs or cars. The typical luxury automobile today has 20 to 30 microprocessors in it, more computing power by far than was inside the landing-craft that took the first astronauts to the moon.
现在全世界每年销售的 PC 数量比电视机和汽车多。今天典型的豪华汽车中有 20 到 30 个微处理器，比那个把第一批宇航员送上月球的登月飞船的计算能力还强。
Last year there were five times more E-mail messages sent than the number of pieces of paper mail delivered worldwide, 2.7 trillion E-mails.
去年全球发送的电子邮件数量比传统的纸邮件数量多五倍，达到 27000 亿封。我的信箱容量就总是不够用。我们还可以从另外一个角度看看现在都发生了些什么事。
And I got more than my share. There is another way to look at what is going on. In the mid-1970s, the first super computers appeared.
七十年代中期出现了最初的超级计算机，计算能力是大约每秒一亿次，价格大约是一百万美元。
They were capable of about 100 million calculations per second. And they cost about one million dollars. Today the laptop computer that college students carry in their bags, packs, is twice as fast as that first super computer, and it costs less than 3000 dollars.
而如今大学生的书包里装着的膝上型计算机的计算能力是那种超级计算机的两倍，价格却只有不到 3000 美元。数据存储技术的发展趋势更是令人瞠目。
The trend in data storage is even more impressive. In the early 80s, the standard unit of computer storage, one mega-byte, or one million bytes of information, cost about 100 dollars. Today, it is 10 cents. In two years, it will cost 2 cents. T
八十年代初期，一个标准单位的计算机存储能力，即 1MB，或者说 1 百万字节，售价是 100 美元，而现在却只要 10 美分，两年内还将降到 2 美分。
hese gains are driven by continuous advances in how we pack information into smaller and smaller spaces.
这种结果是在技术不断进步的推动下产生的，我们可以把信息存储到越来越小的空间。
If the US Library of Congress could shrink its collections of 17 million books by the same factor we just discussed, it could replace 800 kilometers of shelf space with less than 40 meters of space.
如果把这种技术用到美国国会图书馆的 1700 百万册存书上，其书架长度将由 800 公里变成不到 40 米。
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