Reborn Tech Maniac

Chapter 43 The Father of Chinese Computers
The office of Zheru Baodao subsidiary is next to the popular computers of Jian Mingren and Wang Xueling, and a small number of employees have overlapping positions.

According to Tang Huan's conception, the operation of Fangyuan Computer in Baodao is based on a localization strategy, which is basically handed over to Dazhong Computer, which can avoid many unnecessary troubles, and the business scope of Zheru Subsidiary will be more comprehensive. Some.

Tang Huan inspected it, and was quite satisfied. It's just that Dazhong Computer's focus is completely on Fangyuan Computer, and some ignore the Xiaobawang game console, which makes him feel a little unhappy.

But it's no wonder that the large-scale listing of Fangyuan computers is destined to promote the progress of social informatization, and under the special situation of Baodao, it happens to win the favor of some people, thus gaining both fame and fortune, and the motivation is naturally stronger. enough.

Zheru US Headquarters produced some prototypes, most of which were transported to Baodao by plane and displayed for customers in the office of Volkswagen Computer. The factory in Hsinchu Science Park is still assembling and debugging the equipment. The order here It has already been stacked very high, which shows how hungry the market is.

A group of people are visiting now, accompanied by Jian Mingren himself.

"Mr. Tang, that is Mr. Zhu Bangfu, the inventor of the Cangjie input method." Shi Chongtang introduced in a soft voice.

Tang Huan exclaimed unexpectedly. He did not expect to meet this outstanding person in the history of the development of Chinese computers, who was hailed as the "Father of Chinese Computers" by the Chinese in Baodao and Xiangjiang.

Zhu Bangfu was born in 1937. His father was an influential figure in the military and political circles.

During his childhood, Zhu Bangfu moved around due to the war, and finally settled in Baodao when he was entering middle school. Later, he went to Brazil to develop, and also stayed in the United States for a period of time.During this period, my mother and father died successively.

When Zhu Bangfu was working at the Brazilian Culture Publishing House, he witnessed how Chinese printing technology was backward compared with English in the publishing process of a book, so he switched to the improvement of Chinese printing technology.

In 1973, Zhu Bangfu returned to Baodao. In the following years of hard work, according to his idea, he took Chinese typewriters as his practical goal, developed Chinese retrieval methods, and improved Chinese printing technology.

Later, with the assistance of Ms. Shen Honglian, at the end of 1976, Zhu Bangfu invented a Chinese morphological retrieval method using 52 letters as the search key, that is, "Cangjie Input Method".Zhu Bangfu, who didn't know much about computers, started to get in touch with computer programming languages ​​from this time.

At present, with the help of his friends, Zhu Bangfu has established a computer company to develop Chinese terminals.

Since microcomputers were not yet popular and practical, Zhu Bangfu attracted a lot of negative criticism from society.

The business community is not optimistic about the Chinese computer market and is unwilling to invest; the scientific and technological personnel in the academic circle advocate the elimination of Chinese as soon as possible.

Zhu Bangfu was ridiculed.His situation can be described as isolated and helpless.

But now, the Fangyuan computer has been born, and its real functions are in front of it. Anyone who dares to question the computer processing of Chinese information will want to be slapped in the face. Zhu Bangfu, who is still in the technical exploration stage, has discovered the guidance direction lighthouse.

"Mr. Tang, I have admired your name for a long time, and it is a great honor to meet you."

When Zhu Bangfu saw Tang Huan, he took the initiative to greet him without any introduction, "The Fangyuan computer you invented is a great innovation."

"Mr. Zhu has won the award, and he is really ashamed." Tang Huan immediately exchanged warm greetings with him.

According to the original historical development, in 1980, with the technical support of Shi Zhenrong, Zhu Bangfu and Acer jointly developed a Chinese computer with "Chinese operating system, Chinese programming language, and Chinese packaged software" - Tianlong Chinese Computer, priced at 75 Yuan Taiwan dollars.But obviously, there's no way a $[-] PC can win the market.

In the following year, Zhu Bangfu launched a Chinese terminal. Later, he established Lingyi Computer Company to provide low-cost computer Chinese language services for manufacturers.

In order to make Chinese computers more popular and allow Chinese people to study together, Zhu Bangfu published a statement in the newspaper stating that he would give up the patent rights of the Cangjie input method, announced that he was willing to disclose all the technologies, and sold the shares of Lingyi Company at a price of NT$1000 million.

Relevant parties in Baodao agreed with this proposal and entrusted technical personnel from Wang An, Acer, and Shentong to go to Lingyi Company for detailed appraisal, and Zhu Bangfu gave a public explanation.The proposal was finally approved, and the final outcome of the acquisition was planned for 1983.

But during this period, disputes arose between the 13000-character Big5 coding system formulated by relevant parties in Baodao and Zhu Bangfu's Chinese coding system that could accommodate more than 50000 characters.

In addition, it was reported that Zhu Bangfu's system was also promoted and used in the mainland. As a result, Zhu Bangfu left Taiwan in April 1983, hid in the United States, and transferred all ownership of Lingyi Company to employees.

Since then, Zhu Bangfu has been further and further away from his ideal of computer processing of Chinese information.

But in any case, Zhu Bangfu can be regarded as a legend.

Looking at Zhu Bangfu, who is in his early forties and energetic, Tang Huan can't help feeling sorry and emotional when he thinks of his gains and losses in the Chinese information computer processing business.

If a computer wants to process various information in binary, it must use coding technology to identify various basic components.

In this regard, Western languages ​​like English, which only have 26 basic letters and can be encoded with only a 128-bit ASCII table, have a natural advantage, while Chinese will take a lot of trouble.

From the perspective of logical structure, although Chinese characters can be divided into different basic components such as radicals and radicals, there are too many, far more than 26, and these basic components also have positions, orientations, and orientations when forming Chinese characters. Variety.

Therefore, it is difficult to classify, replay and process Chinese information based on the text structure.

Some radical technicians even use this to advocate the elimination of Chinese characters.For China, which invented papermaking and printing, this phenomenon is a bit sad.

On the way to overcome these difficulties, many famous Chinese emerged, such as Zhu Bangfu, Ni Guangnan, Wang Xuan, Wang Yongmin, etc. It can be said that it took more than ten years of hard work to gradually solve this problem.

As a reborn person, Tang Huan naturally wanted to shorten this process so that the Chinese would have more time to focus on operating systems, networks and other technologies.

First of all, Tang Huan has already planned a set of encoding schemes including simplified and traditional characters—Tangma, which directly covers the contents of GB-2312 and Big5 in the original time and space.

With the strong popularity of Fangyuan computers, Tangma will inevitably become the industry standard, even the official standard.

Secondly, in terms of input method, Tang Huan chose the easy-to-use pinyin input method.

The basic education here in Baodao starts with the teaching of phonetic symbols. Traditional characters use the phonetic input method, while simplified characters use the Chinese pinyin input method.

Of course, the workload of the entire project is very heavy. Tang Huan cannot complete it by himself, and there is no need for that. He only planned a general framework, realized the functions of the pioneering and core modules, and then arranged a concise Ren is going to work on traditional characters. As for the work on simplified characters, Tang Huan is looking for someone else to advance. I believe my aunt will recommend suitable candidates for me.

However, these difficulties are only intellectual software overhead, and hardware cost factors must also be taken into account.

After the text is sorted and coded according to certain rules and can be retrieved through the input method, everything is still not all right. In order to display them, the computer must also arrange a matching storage space, including the ASCII table of 26 basic English letters. Not much, but the cost of fonts containing tens of thousands of Chinese characters is high.

For example, in order to allow Epson's 7-pin dot matrix printer to print out Chinese characters, the print head needs to go back and forth twice between odd and even lines according to the setting of the 12x12 dot matrix font to complete the printing of a Chinese character.

In this font, the dot matrix information of a Chinese character requires 32 bytes of storage space.

The traditional Chinese font library created by Jian Mingren contains nearly 1 characters. Roughly speaking, the required storage space reaches 320K, which is beyond the reach of a microcomputer.

You should know that the current mainstream 8-bit CPUs, such as Intel's 8080, Zilog's Z80, Motorola's 6800, and MOSTechnology's 6502, have a maximum addressable address space of 64K. 48KB of memory.

Seeing this situation, Tang Huan had no choice but to go into battle again and used data compression technology to reduce the space occupied by the Chinese character library to an acceptable level. Only then did it become possible for commercial use.

Fortunately, during this period, RB's electronics industry developed rapidly, and the prices of various components dropped rapidly, and both costs and profits could be taken into account. This was one of the main reasons why Tang Huan left the United States and went to Asia to set up factories.

Therefore, in the original historical time and space, the computerization of Chinese characters was very tortuous.

Now, Tang Huan has set the direction and framework in the initial stage. Although no one can realize the greatness of this work yet, time will tell everything, and it doesn't matter if he hides his merits and fame temporarily.

Comparing Tang Huan and Zhu Bangfu's practices in Chinese information computer processing, it can be found that Tang Huan, who is proficient in technological trends and market laws, is relatively pragmatic, while Zhu Bangfu is somewhat idealistic.

Of course, if Zhu Bangfu is willing to accept the support provided by Tang Huan in the early stage of personal computer development, his comprehensive Chinese information computer processing system of "six functions of Chinese characters" including character code, font shape, word order, word pronunciation, word meaning, and character identification The ideal is not necessarily impossible to realize.

In this way, it will also greatly promote the preservation and research of various ancient Chinese books.

"What I told is the truth. Seeing the functions of Fangyuan Computer, I found that my research direction seems to need to be adjusted." Zhu Bangfu looked at Tang Huan and said sincerely.

Tang Huan murmured slightly, "Mr. Zhu, with all due respect, you may not be good at the underlying computer technology, so it is better to concentrate all your energy on the arrangement of Chinese codes and the design of input methods, and leave the hardware to be implemented by special personnel. "

Zhu Bangfu showed a puzzled look on his face, "I don't quite understand the division of labor you mentioned."

"For example, the Fangyuan computer has a circuit board inside it, which I call the Chinese card, which is specially used to store the Chinese character library, process Chinese character input and display Chinese characters. Remove the Chinese card, and the Fangyuan computer is an ordinary English-language computer. Computer, with the Chinese card installed, it becomes a Chinese computer." Tang Huan explained patiently.

Zhu Bangfu nodded suddenly, "That is to say, I just need to concentrate on designing another Chinese card that supports Chinese characters more comprehensively, and then install it on the Fangyuan computer."

Tang Huan nodded with a smile. Of course, the specific implementation is not that simple, and it also involves the support details of the operating system and other aspects, but the general idea is the same.

"Listening to what you have to say is better than ten years of reading. Mr. Tang, how about we have a few drinks for dinner, I treat you." Zhu Bangfu said excitedly.

"Naturally, I can't wait to ask for more, but Zheru Company should be in charge of entertaining Mr. Zhu." Tang Huan laughed loudly, then turned to Shi Chongtang and said, "Chongtang, arrange a hotel for us later."

Shi Chongtang nodded in agreement, and then said in a low voice, "Miss Lin is here, she's in the office."

Tang Huan let out an expressionless expression, and then made an apologetic gesture to Zhu Bangfu, "Mr. Zhu, you can visit as you like first, and I will deal with other matters."

After leaving, Tang Huan hurried back to the office and saw Lin Fengjiao waiting quietly.

"You are not feeling well, why don't you take more rest." Tang Huan walked over and said with concern.

"It's okay. It must be very tiring to see you busy all day. I specially made soup and sent it to you to nourish your body." Lin Fengjiao smiled gently.

(End of this chapter)