Reborn Tech Maniac

Chapter 556: Preparing for a Rainy Day in Computer Security
Since Tang Huan was interested, the meeting was immediately scheduled.The management of Symantec who received the notification didn't dare to waste any time, and rushed over without stopping.

Everyone is so enthusiastic, which is also the meaning of the title. It is said that it is entirely because they want to follow the path of the richest man. Tang Huan's status in Silicon Valley, his insights on the industry, and even his academic achievements are the deepest reasons for everyone's pilgrimage. hierarchical reasons.

Especially after he obtained his Ph.D., he continued to write, which further attracted countless IT apprentices to read the articles, which can be said to be more and more like a master.

The meeting place was at the Tang’s Chinese restaurant not far from Zheru’s American headquarters. It recently held a theme - "Taste on the tip of the tongue". In addition to carefully selected Chinese dishes, Also played a retro style, which includes the element of "waiter".

These waiters are all senior industry insiders invited from mainland China for short-term work. For Tang Huan, they want to play with special culture, but for them, it is a gold-plated overseas job opportunity. joy.

Of course, the waiters here do not play the role of traditional waiters, nor do they need to greet you with "Master, you guys" like in the old days. They mainly perform technical performances, and one of the highlights is the "roaring hall".The waiter, who has a loud and clear voice, announces the names of the dishes in a smooth and flowing manner, and his sense of rhythm has already broken through the language barrier.

The atmosphere in Silicon Valley is unfettered openness and freedom. The "personality" of the restaurant has not surprisingly attracted a large number of diners, making it a bustling crowd.

Of course, this kind of style cannot be favored by everyone. Those who like romantic and quiet customers can go to French restaurants, and the waiters only need to satisfy the guests with the same taste.

Looking at a middle-aged chef, in addition to filling 8 bowls of fried rice with eggs in his left hand from palm to arm, he also held 4 bowls of fried rice with eggs in his right hand, and he was still able to show off this unique skill of piling rice in one go. 12 bowls of egg fried rice were delivered, and the people who were invited were amazed, and immediately began to taste them.

"Waiting is a high-tech job in old-fashioned Chinese restaurants. It is described as 'the head of a monkey, the mouth of a starling, the measure of an elephant, and the legs of a rabbit'." Tang Huan talked about various allusions with great interest, "A waiter is not a chef. , but he must be clear about the taste characteristics and cooking procedures of each dish; he is not a sociologist, but he must be familiar with the habits and customs of different religions, different nationalities, and different social classes; You have to learn to read your face and speak appropriately."

Everyone was fascinated and praised repeatedly.Gordon Eubanks, chairman of the board of directors of Symantec, even made a joke by analogy, "Our marketing department needs such skills. However, although Chinese food is delicious, it is too difficult to do it yourself. "

"The production process of Chinese food is really not easy to master. Take the oil and salt as an example. Often it is almost enough based on experience, but you definitely want to be able to clearly quantify how many milliliters and how many grams. This difference is Compared with classical mathematics, fuzzy mathematics just emerging." Tang Huan's witty remarks made everyone laugh, and the atmosphere became more casual.

In the original time and space, Symantec's road to commercial success, like EA, achieved its own development and rapid expansion of market share through continuous mergers and acquisitions.

Just this year, Symantec just completed the merger with an IT start-up company that is also in the early stages of development, in order to get rid of the dilemma that the company's actual main business is too weak.

Fortunately, this change did not cause the consequences of personnel turmoil. The founder Gary Hendricks, as well as the key personnel of the artificial intelligence project Barry Greenstein and Jerry Kaplan, all stayed.

And in Tang Huan's view, Symantec's leadership team that will charge forward in the market in the future has already taken shape.In addition to Gordon Eubanks as chairman of the company's board of directors, Fern Rayburn served as chief executive officer.And the two also invited Rod Turner to be the executive vice president, focusing on marketing and other work.

For Symantec, a small company that started to improve its management because of Tang Huan's golden thigh, its current management team is full of talents.

When the Symantec team came to see Tang Huan, they were still a little uneasy. Only Gordon Eubanks was calmly making a small calculation in his mind.As soon as the two sides met, the unexpected surprise he expected really came.

At that time, Tang Huan looked at Gordon Eubanks and said in surprise: "We should have met before, you are a student of Gary Kildare."

"Exactly. When you visited the headquarters of the Monterey County Digital Research Corporation in 1979, I was with the teacher." Gordon Eubanks suppressed the ecstasy in his heart and replied calmly.

There is no doubt that the acquaintance between Gordon Eubanks and Tang Huan will help enhance the cooperative relationship between the two parties and help him consolidate his position in the company.

In fact, for Gordon Eubanks, who was transferred to Symantec, being able to talk face-to-face with Tang Huan again felt like a dream.

Five years ago, Tang Huan rose rapidly by relying on the first electronic spreadsheet software CGrid. Since he successively developed the word processing software WordEasy, he was directly defeated by his competitor, Seymour Rubenstein, the owner of another word processing software WordStar. He hated it, and then tried to use the contacts he had accumulated in Silicon Valley for many years to join forces with other companies to block him.

The first meeting between the two was when Tang Huan visited Gary Kildare to lobby the digital research company's operating system CP/M not to be involved in this dispute.

At that time, everyone was still in the same status and treated as equals, but now one is in the sky and the other is on the ground.

Gordon Eubanks has a lot of technical skills. When he followed Gary Kildare to study for a doctorate, he developed a compiler for BASIC, a programming language that was very popular on the personal computer platform at that time, called BASIC-E.

In the first stage of personal computer development, Altair Computer took the lead in the market, and IMSAI was the chaser who rose to copycats.

Seeing that the Altair computer was supported by Microsoft's BASIC, Seymour Rubinstein, who was still in charge of IMSAI marketing at the time, accepted the assignment of his boss William Millard to find similar applications to compete with it, so Gordon Eubank Sri Lanka's BASIC compiler was chosen.

However, BASIC-E was developed with the help of public resources and cannot be used for commercial sales as a rule.Gordon Eubanks's solution was also very simple. Based on BASIC-E, he launched another new compiler CBASIC with more functions, and finally got IMSAI's business.

With this good start, Gordon Eubanks founded a company to operate CBASIC by himself, forming a pattern of competition with Gates' Microsoft BASIC.

It is not difficult to imagine that the fledgling CBASIC is naturally not as mature as the Microsoft BASIC that has been developed for many years.For example, it has non-negligible problems in the accuracy required for the calculation of financial functions.

However, CBASIC also has new features that Microsoft BASIC does not have.Gordon Eubanks introduced the mechanism of intermediate code P-codemachine for it.This technology is actually the predecessor of Bytecode used by the famous JAVA more than ten years later in time and space. Even Microsoft VisualBASIC, the most popular rapid application development tool, generates similar intermediate codes by default when compiling programs.

In addition to being independent of specific machine code, P-codemachine can also protect the programmer's intellectual work.

CBASIC interprets and executes the intermediate code, while Microsoft BASIC directly interprets and executes the code source file, so it is difficult to protect the intellectual property rights when delivering the development results.

Therefore, although CBASIC has low qualifications, it still has the strength to compete with Microsoft BASIC.And when Gates entered the field of operating systems, as a counterattack, Gary Kildare acquired the company of his student Gordon Eubanks, which made CBASIC integrated in the operating system CP/M of Digital Research Corporation.

It's a pity that Gary Kildare really doesn't have any business talent and can't resist Microsoft's attack at all.

Seeing that the digital research company was in decline and the future was gloomy, Gordon Eubanks flew out solo to find another way out, and he was silent for a while.

Seeing Tang Huan, who has been separated for five years, so high and high-spirited, Gordon Eubanks is very excited, especially when the other party still remembers him, it seems like a great opportunity.

The others in Symantec, seeing that Gordon Eubanks, chairman of the board, could easily establish friendship with Tang Huan, were naturally extremely excited, and subconsciously followed his lead in speech and behavior more and more.

Tang Huan also brought someone to accompany him. His name was Peter Norton. He was an excellent programmer and author of computer books, and he had similar interests.

Therefore, Tang Huan invested and helped Peter Norton establish a company called PeterNortonComputing, Inc.A cross-platform system tool software company.

Peter Norton has worked for some large institutions including Boeing and Jet Propulsion Laboratory for more than ten years. He has long been exposed to mainframes and minicomputers and has a good understanding of the underlying architecture of computer systems.

Although Peter Norton became a monk in a monastery in San Francisco in the 1970s and became a monk for three years, his skills were not abandoned. After he was moved to return to the vulgar world, he quickly adapted to the technological development of the personal computer industry.

Under Tang Huan's suggestion, Peter Norton developed the system program Norton Utilities - Norton Computer Doctor, which includes two popular tool software - Data Recovery Master and Computer Information Expert.

The former is to give computer users a chance to regret medicine, and try to help them recover files that were accidentally deleted; the latter can identify information on various personal computer hardware devices, and has become an indispensable assistant for major computer professional media evaluations.

Such system tools must serve as many computer users as possible, and support hardware platforms such as Fangyuan Computer, IBM-PC, Apple Computer, etc., so they are not suitable for staying in the system of Zheru and Fangyuan, and they have been independent from the beginning. _Stand up and develop.

A set of NortonUtilities is currently priced at US$100, and sales exceeded US$100 million last year. They are also small companies that have been in business for less than three years. They are better than Symantec, which has been developing artificial intelligence but has been unable to bring actual commercial profits. 01:30 o'clock.

Therefore, after Tang Huanju's introduction, the attitude of Gordon Eubanks and others towards Peter Norton can be said to be like a torrent of admiration.

Seeing that they were chatting enthusiastically, Tang Huan couldn't help being amused in his heart, and he didn't know what kind of chemical reaction would spontaneously occur after the two companies got acquainted.In terms of commercial operation capabilities alone, Peter Norton is obviously far inferior to Gordon Eubanks' team. It's just that he meets the current business opportunities and has not yet encountered enough competitors to compete for food.

After exchanging pleasantries, Tang Huan and Gary Hendricks talked about the topic of artificial intelligence. Zheru also has similar projects, such as game AI, expert system, etc., but the other party has been in this field for more than ten years, and he is still quite capable. Insightful.

Compared with the artificial intelligence that ordinary consumers can easily experience such as Apple Siri - Apple voice assistant, Microsoft Cortana - Microsoft Cortana, Microsoft Xiaoice, etc. that people will be familiar with decades later in the original time and space, the current application of this technology Still relatively aloof.

At the beginning of artificial intelligence research and development, it has been sought after by various countries and has invested a lot of money.But after the oil crisis broke out in the 1970s, the interest in burning money dropped to a freezing point.

After entering the 1980s, Japan, which was not short of money, took the lead in making big moves. In 1981, its Ministry of International Trade and Industry announced that it would allocate 8 million US dollars to support a large-scale research and development plan called "fifth-generation computers."The goal is to create machines that can converse with humans, translate language, interpret images, and reason like humans.The main programming language chosen for this project is Prolog.

Other countries have responded accordingly: the United Kingdom has started the Alvey project costing 3 million pounds; an American business association has organized Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation - Microelectronics and Computer Technology Group, or MCC, to provide AI and information technology for large-scale projects. Funding; DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under the US Department of Defense, also took action and organized the Strategic Computing Initiative, the Strategic Computing Promotion Association, to actively invest in AI projects.

The field of artificial intelligence is too broad and profound. In the new round of research and development boom, Tang Huan mainly focuses on projects that meet the current computer capabilities.

In terms of game AI, EA often provides a super difficult version with a little more code in the luxury package of some classic games to satisfy the challenge psychology of players.

In addition, the database EBase is an extremely important platform, and Zheru uses this as the background to develop information retrieval and expert systems for various fields.

Symantec's natural language artificial intelligence answering program Q&A is a beneficial and inexpensive solution. Now that it has been transplanted to the Fangyuan personal computer platform, Tang Huan is also willing to support it.

"I believe that Q&A will bring good benefits to Symantec." Tang Huan, who clearly expressed his support, made an optimistic assessment, and then changed the subject: "Actually, artificial intelligence should be able to help computers to a certain extent. The system judges which operational behaviors are potentially harmful."

Speaking of this, Tang Huan sighed softly, "Fangyuan personal computer has become the most popular and largest hardware platform. While bringing countless honors, it also makes me feel like walking on eggshells about computer security issues. From the service department Judging from the feedback, more and more prank programs began to run quietly in the computer. No one knows when it will break out and really threaten the user's data security. I must start now to plan ahead Prepare."

Tang Huan looked around at the people of Symantec, "Your technical background is good, you might as well take a step ahead in this regard."

"Countless examples have proven that Tang's grasp of the industry is extremely accurate. Now that Symantec has received guidance, of course we will not miss this opportunity." Gordon Eubanks expressed his stance enthusiastically with his eyes shining. , "However, Symantec's capital flow is still tight, and if it wants to launch a new research and development plan, it must consider introducing new investors."

"You're trying to get investment from me." Tang Huan laughed loudly, turned his gaze to Barry Greenstein and said, "You, a poker master, play an extremely important role in artificial intelligence projects. Let's play a few How is the game? As long as you win, investment is just a matter of words."

Barry Greenstein rubbed his hands and smiled confidently, "Then I'm welcome."

(End of this chapter)