Reborn Tech Maniac

Chapter 363 The Laptop Turned Out

"In my opinion, every place that attracts the attention of the world is an excellent display platform." Tang Huan made a calm gesture, "In short, I speak for myself."

"I would like to hear more about it." Ted Turner nodded curiously.

Tang Huan beckoned, and an assistant immediately brought two handbags.

When Ted Turner saw the portable computer in the first big bag, he laughed, "I've seen this kind of personal computer."

"Then carry this small bag and estimate its weight." Tang Huan invited Ted Turner to try it.

"Ten pounds." Ted Turner added one last sentence after pondering, "No more than 15 pounds."

"Your answer is quite reliable. To be precise, it weighs 11 pounds, about 5 kilograms." Tang Huan took the handbag and took out a device that looked like a book but was much larger.

When Ted Turner found that the thing with a metal shell in front of him could be folded, and there was a screen and a keyboard when it was opened, he immediately asked in surprise, "This, is this also a computer?"

"You don't have to doubt, this device is indeed a personal computer." Tang Huan nodded with a smile, with a smug expression on his face, "Its commercial positioning name is called Square & Circle Laptop, but we are used to nickname it Square & Circle Notebook , although it is still a long way from the size and weight of a notebook."

Watching the Fangyuan laptop start up and run a few more programs, Ted Turner was amazed, and couldn't stop saying, "It's amazing."

The development of computers is naturally divided into several directions with completely different footholds. Since there are those who pursue extreme performance, they have to abandon this point and instead pursue short and compact ones that can be carried around. This concept was first introduced by Xerox PARC in the 1970s. It is reflected in the Dynabook project and the Xerox NoteTaker project.

The truly commercial portable personal computer, of course, is the eye-catching Osborne 1981 in the past 1, the Osborne first generation machine, with a weight of 10.7 kg, on the road of portable-portability, it is only Come to the "movable" step.

But even so, the market response was still very enthusiastic. In the eight months after its debut at the West Coast Computer Festival in San Francisco in April 1981, a total of 4 Osborne first-generation machines were sold.After the factory's manufacturing link was opened up, this year's monthly sales unexpectedly reached an exaggerated peak—11000 units.

Since the market is so optimistic, other manufacturers will naturally follow up quickly, and Osborne is not allowed to monopolize this field.

The first Osborne machine, priced at US$1795, was introduced to the market in the year when it met Kaypro II, the rival Kaypro company. Because it saw the brilliance of the Apple II, it applied the Roman numeral "II". Stained with fairy spirit, and its market price is very targeted, which is 1595 US dollars.

The first Osborne machine has two obvious shortcomings. First, the display device it uses is a 5-inch or 12-centimeter CRT monochrome display; second, its floppy disk drive only supports single-sided single-density floppy disks with a capacity of only It is 90 KB, which is already behind the storage requirements of current mainstream applications.

Therefore, Kaypro Company has made corresponding enhancements for Kaypro II for these two points. The display device is a 9-inch CRT monochrome display, which allows users to view the screen information more clearly; the floppy disk drive supports single-sided double-density floppy disks , the capacity has risen to 191 KB, which meets the software requirements for larger storage capacity.

Although the weight has reached 13 kg, due to the advantages of price and hardware specifications, the popularity of Kaypro II in the market is no worse than that of Osborne 1, and Adam Osborne's management of Osborne has frequently made mistakes and omissions , such as focusing only on PR and marketing, while ignoring quality control.

Seeing that Adam Osborne is still following the original path of failure, Tang Huan is very disappointed, but it is his own start-up company, he has no position to make irresponsible remarks, and the other party belongs to a person with a strong personality , there is no need for Zhu Bajie to look in the mirror-he is not a person inside or outside.

Since Adam Osborne is very likely to fail and be eliminated from the market, Tang Huan has to pick up the category corresponding to Osborne 1 in addition to the notebook category in the portable personal computer product line.

Fortunately, Zheru has a strong technical reserve in this field, and Tang Huan's holding companies Epson and Radio Shack have quite successful products such as Epson HX-20 and Tandy TRS-80 respectively, so the research and development was completed in one go.

In this way, in addition to the Square & Circle Laptop, Square & Circle Portable has been added to the portable category of Fangyuan Computer's product line, which are the two small and large personal computers in front of us.

The reason why Tang Huan rolled up his sleeves and went into battle himself after discovering that Adam Osborne's Osborne mud could not support the wall was that he had no choice but to do so.

After Big Blue released the IBM-PC technical white paper, it is bound to attract a group of gold diggers to adopt this free standard and enter the personal computer industry, such as Compaq, which was just established this year.

Of course, Tang Huan can incorporate this company in advance, but it doesn’t make much sense. This situation is different from SGI—Silicon Valley Graphics Corporation and SUN—Sun Microsystems entered the workstation field with its own technology, because IBM turned the table and set up this bureau. Its strength is far beyond the comparison of SGI and SUN, which are still in the founding stage.

As the so-called current events create heroes, without this Compaq, other people will naturally rise up to take advantage of the big tree of IBM-PC. Dell in the original time and space——Dell is another example.

Therefore, in Tang Huan's view, since Big Blue's free IBM-PC standard will always give birth to a "son of destiny", it is better to let Compaq, who knows the basics, occupy this pit.

In the IBM-PC compatible machine war in the original time and space, Compaq finally became the king, and IBM made wedding dresses for others.

Big Blue is a tragedy, but it is precisely because of the vigorous and innovative third-party compatible machine manufacturers like Compaq that help IBM-PC become the market standard that dominates the world.

But this objective result is unacceptable to Tang Huan. On the premise of allowing Compaq to exist, he must spare no effort to attack Compaq, an excellent IBM-PC accomplice, even though it is a competitor who picked the blue giant's peach.

How did Compaq become king?

First, it uses the "black box" method that does not touch copyright protection to crack the BIOS in the IBM-PC standard that Big Blue left for itself.

Then, it designed and manufactured a portable compatible IBM-PC - Compaq Portable.

As a result, it created a marketing miracle in the first year, selling 53000 PCs and generating $1.11 million in revenue.

This shows how gratifying the space in the portable personal computer market is.

Unfortunately, Osborne is not as competitive as Apple.

Therefore, Tang Huan, who wanted to make high-end profits with Fangyuan laptops in the field of portable personal computers, had no choice but to turn around and sweep the low-end market, so as not to be taken advantage of by Compaq.

The CPU used by Fangyuan notebook computer and Fangyuan portable computer is Motorola's MC68000 series processor, because this family has evolved from a 32-bit version to a 16-bit and 8-bit version under the premise of the same instruction architecture, hardware configuration Extremely flexible.

More importantly, Tang Huan and Motorola have a very close cooperative relationship. For example, in the field of microprocessors, it is not a simple business relationship, but involved in almost the whole process from design to manufacturing. MC68000 is half of his son.

Thanks to Tang Huan's promotion, the development of MC68000 has greatly exceeded the original level of time and space, and it is now the most successful general-purpose microprocessor on the market.

FAB1, a French semiconductor factory, has achieved great technological achievements. With the cooperation of Motorola and Sharp, they jointly launched MC68000HC68, the CMOS technology-manufactured version of MC000.

The MC68000 manufactured with HMOS technology is still in a state of high power consumption even when the CPU is idle, and its power consumption has basically nothing to do with the frequency.

The MC68HC000 using CMOS technology, except for the difference between CMOS and HMOS on the circuit, is completely consistent with MC68000 in other aspects, so its energy consumption has been greatly reduced.

Divided according to operating speed, MC68HC000 has multiple versions from 8MHz to 20MHz.

在25摄氏度的环境下，MC68000的能耗大约为1.35瓦，而MC68HC000的能耗，8MHz的版本仅为0.13瓦。

The MC68HC000 consumes more power as it runs faster, but only 20 watts for the 0.38 MHz version.

It is no exaggeration to say that MC68HC000 is definitely the most coveted general-purpose microprocessor that Tang Huan can pursue at the current stage.

One of the major technical difficulties of the second-generation Xiaobawang game console is the heat dissipation. With the MC68HC000, the problem has been solved.

The Fangyuan notebook computer and Fangyuan portable computer also benefited greatly from the addition of MC68HC000.But in order to establish a cost advantage in the low-end field, the CPU used by the latter is relatively low-grade.

In addition to the difference in the adoption strategy of the microprocessor, another major difference between the Fangyuan notebook computer and the Fangyuan portable computer is naturally the display device.

The latter uses a 9-inch CRT monochrome display, while the former is a 320×240-pixel Electroluminescent Display—Electroluminescent Displays or ELDs, which is also the secret of its foldability and greatly reduced weight.

There are many display technologies, such as the most common Cathode Ray Tube—Cathode Ray Tube, or CRT, and Light emitting diode Display, or LED.

As for the Liquid-crystal Display, which is used in laptops decades later in the original time and space, liquid crystal display is still in the stage of technical research. It is used for Fangyuan notebook computer.

Tang Huan had no choice but to give up and chose the implementation plan of ELDs. After all, the title of the world's first laptop computer does not wait for anyone.

In fact, competing for the first place in the industry largely depends on hype, especially in a chaotic industry environment like personal computers.

Take the original time and space, widely recognized as the world's first notebook computer - T1985 launched by Toshiba in 1100, its title is often omitted by the media, that is "for the mass market", Because it sells for a generally acceptable $1899.

The hardware configuration of the Toshiba T1100 is also far from the general sense of the notebook computer, the most obvious is the lack of the iconic lithium-ion battery, and this is the technical threshold that Tang Huan is currently unable to cross.

Both Fangyuan laptops and Fangyuan portable computers use AC power, and at the same time support Uninterruptible Power Supply——UPS, which is developed for enterprise-level application products such as Fangyuan personal workstations and Fangyuan network servers.

The similarities between the two in terms of hardware configuration are that there is no hard disk, but there is a 720-inch floppy disk drive with a capacity of 3.5 KB; interface devices including serial ports, parallel ports, network cards, and modems.

Of course, complying with Fangyuan Computer standards is what the question should have said.

Caressing the aluminum alloy shell of Fangyuan's laptop, Ted Turner felt a little fond of it, so he asked casually, "What is the market price of this computer?"

"US$19999." Tang Huan replied indifferently, seeing the surprised look on the other side's face, he added, "The product I tried is naturally the highest-end model, and the cheapest model should be 10000 US dollars. "

"It's so expensive, the customer range of the product is probably very limited." Ted Turner laughed dryly.

"Clients from the U.S. government, NASA, the U.S. military, etc. are waiting for my subordinates to develop them. I just need to help them advertise." Tang Huan laughed loudly.

(End of this chapter)