Reborn Tech Maniac

Chapter 766 The chaos caused by the World Wide Web

PS: It is estimated that we will not be able to deal with the blocking of chapter 0833 until the editors go to work on Monday. Please calm down.

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The media is only joking, and an industry expert like Tang Huan will not take it seriously—no one can ignore IBM’s technical strength in the high-end field, not to mention that this time Big Blue has changed its procrastinating style, and its product line layout can be described as thorough.

The RS/6000, which uses POWER microprocessors, has launched the POWERServer series and POWERStation series respectively for the server and workstation markets, and has expanded downwards to mobile computers and desktop computers, showing great potential to counterattack the personal computer market.

As the most important core component in the computer hardware system, POWER not only has the conventional design of current RISC, but also breaks a unique skill of Holder, that is, register renaming and chaos, which are important for parallel execution of the processor. Sequence execution technology.

This limited data flow architecture computing method was successfully introduced to microprocessors by Zheru for the first time.Don't look at competitors like MIPS and SPARC, they are also prospering while taking advantage of the RISC craze, but at key nodes such as this, they can only do nothing.But now, IBM's POWER has taken the lead in breaking Zheru Holder's monopoly.

The POWER microprocessor, which was placed high hopes by IBM and was regarded as a life-saving straw, had an initial operating frequency of 20MHz.Using it as the RS/6000 of the CPU supports a memory capacity between 8MB and 128MB.

In terms of software, RS/6000 is also an "orange outfit", and products such as IBM's own operating system AIX and relational database management system DB2 are available.

In fact, with only these two platforms, RS/6000 is enough to start a new round of competition with Fangyuan servers and Fangyuan workstations in the enterprise market.

In addition, IBM also let go of its figure and joined hands in the industry, trying to find more places for the POWER architecture. Not to mention, it soon hooked up with Apple.

After driving Jobs away, Apple is finally a properly functioning enterprise.

Chief Executive John Sculley brought in the marketing skills he had learned from PepsiCo to clarify the product line.

Jean-Louis Garcy, who took over the Mac division after Jobs, was eventually promoted to head of development.During his term of office, he kept canceling low-end products, while raising prices, and taking the high-end route, which fits well with John Sculley's thinking.

To be fair, in the first few years of their rule, Apple's performance was remarkable, which proved to the outside world that it was correct to oust Steve Jobs, the founder.

However, computers are not cola after all. No matter how colorful the marketing is, in the end, technical strength still has to speak for itself.

In the past two years, sales of Apple products have declined sharply.

In this way, Jean-Louis Gacy was first questioned and was forced to leave this year. Michael Spindler took over as the development director. Naturally, he began to reflect on Apple's product development. The first thing that bore the brunt was the need for a A powerful enough CPU.

Since it has long used Motorola's MC68000 series microprocessors, Apple naturally hopes that the other party will provide solutions.

In the same level competition of the latest generation of CPUs, Motorola's MC68040 surpassed Intel's Intel80486 in performance, but heat generation is a problem that cannot be ignored, and the two sides can only be considered a tie.

Therefore, Apple hopes to use the RISC microprocessor that the industry is unanimously optimistic about to make its personal computer products worthy of the high-end line. However, Motorola's RISC research and development results - MC88000, performed so poorly that Apple, which was disappointed, had to give up. The idea of ​​adoption.

At this time, POWER came out, and Apple found a solution at the right time, and then hit it off with IBM.

According to the cooperation statement between the two parties, IBM will use the POWER architecture to derive a type of CPU for Apple that is suitable for personal computer hardware systems.

Tang Huan, who was at the headquarters of the National Science Foundation, couldn't help but frown after receiving this series of news - if IBM really seizes the opportunity of the rise of the Internet and the rigid demand for high-end products such as servers, it might actually be able to make a difference. .

Tang Huan visited the National Science Foundation, but the lobbying effect was not great. Since the funding comes from Congress, whether it can be commercialized will naturally have to be approved by the other party. There are many procedures to go through.

That being the case, let’s let it go for now. Originally, this trip was just a trial, and Tang Huan was still very patient, so he turned to pay attention to NSFNET’s upcoming speed-up plan with a target of 45Mbps.

Gein, this will involve a considerable number of new network nodes, which is a very rare and valuable purchase contract for Yuanyuan servers.

Unexpectedly, just after IBM announced that it would introduce POWER into supercomputers, to defeat RB, who had just won the crown of the world's fastest computer, he brought RS/6000 to grab the order.

Now the richest man, An Sheng, finally got angry. Is this because I have been away from mainstream society for a long time and my subordinates are still here to bully me?

You know, the number of Internet visits has doubled in less than 7 months, which is why NSFNET increases the speed of the Internet every few years.

Although NSFNET promotes its openness and inclusiveness, it is impossible for the solutions adopted for each upgrade to have an impact on the next one.

In other words, if orders are made one upgrade after another, the greater the selection inertia caused by technical stickiness, the greater the chance of winning new orders.

Based on these reasons, how could Tang Huan tolerate IBM coming to steal food?

The previous order to upgrade the Wall Street financial system is lost if it is lost. The culprit of "Black Monday" is not so easy to memorize, but NSFNET does not have similar concerns about avoiding suspicion.

When he came to New York and talked to the media about his views on IBM's launch of POWER, RS/6000 and other new products, Tang Huan said politely: "In addition to out-of-order execution, Holder also has many other exclusive technologies. Leave competitors in the dust."

"In addition, Zheru has set his sights on the 64-bit architecture, which is the same as hard indicators such as operating frequency and process. The performance improvement brought about cannot be caught up by tinkering."

After using the future to create an uproar in the media, Tang Huan continued to express his position on the current situation: "Fangyuan Computer Company will once again compete for the title of the world's fastest computer. I believe that within two years, it will double that of RBNEC." 3GFLOPS of the SX-44/23.2R."

The reporters quickly took notes and did not realize that the boastful richest man was no longer the chairman of the board of directors of Fangyuan Computer Company. It seemed inappropriate to continue to speak out as a spokesperson.

Tang Huan, feeling speechless, quickly changed the subject and said: "At this stage, the completeness of the ecosystem on the Fangyuan Computer platform is ranked first in the industry."

"Take the enterprise market for emerging World Wide Web applications as an example. The server operating system has Artascope, the database has EBase, the WWW server has ZIS, the browser has Polestar, the development tool has the most powerful Zerone_C++_Buider, and the latest fast Application development tools represent Delphi... and so on. What other platform can provide such a complete solution?"

After the words of the richest man were spread by the media, it was like a stone being thrown into a calm pond. It immediately caused a sensational reaction in the industry. Various companies compared each other to determine the position of their own products.

In terms of operating systems, the high-end UNIX and Artascope are constantly fighting openly and secretly. The ancient UNIX has a wider application range, but because of the scattered authorization, it cannot suppress everything that is clenched into a fist; the desktop continues to maintain a clear distinction - Fangyuan PC, IBM's PS/2 and IBM-PC compatibles, Apple's MAC, are all the same.

However, Microsoft has begun to join in the fun and announce that it will officially release Windows 5 in May this year, and promises that this version has a satisfactory and substantial improvement compared to the previous functions.

Now, the IBM-PC compatible camp is happy.They got inside information, and they have already determined that Windows 3.0 can help their products compare with Apple's MAC in terms of graphical user interface.

But the ongoing scandals on the IBM-PC compatible platform are also extremely ironic.

The market for databases, once the troika of software, was in chaos. The only king, DBase, was making a lot of money, which attracted the attention of many family-owned companies.

Everyone is eyeing this piece of fat, so they have launched clone products, such as FOXBase, Arago and so on.

In addition to being [-]% compatible with the original DBase, these copycat database systems also have a unique skill, which is that they can compile database programs written by DBase into executable files, which greatly improves performance.

In the process of adding such new features to DBase and launching a counterattack, Ashton-Tate Company has achieved some success, but it cannot resist the continuous loss of market share. In the end, it can only hope that the most active companies will be punished by the law. FOXBase dragged to court.

According to common sense, Ashton-Tate Company must be accurate.But what is surprising is that in January this year, the California court's ruling not only dismissed the lawsuit, but also declared the copyright of DBase invalid because it imitated the JPDIS of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Ashton-Tate Company in This fact was deliberately concealed when registering DBase with the National Copyright Office.

In other words, Ashton-Tate not only failed to sue FOXBase, but also made an example of "any company can imitate DBase products".

According to reliable sources, Microsoft is interested in FOXBase, which has finally been cleared, and is preparing to take it under its wing to improve the deficiencies of its own software products in the database landscape.

Fortunately, the relational database management system market is more respectable. Products such as EBase, DB2, ORACLE, Informix, and Sybase all have their own characteristics, and each is good at winning.

Programming and development tools have always been in their own way. Zheru and Microsoft each focus on Fangyuan Computer and IBM-PC compatible system. However, when Borland launched Borland_C++ this year, it broke the barriers and supported the simultaneous development of applications running on the two major platforms. , or even as simple as just one line of macro command to notify the compiler.

In addition, while Microsoft was interested in FOXBase, Borland also decided to buy DBase at a bargain price, which was rapidly falling into the abyss due to losing the copyright lawsuit, so as to build the software nation in his mind.

As for browsers and World Wide Web servers, although they have attracted many R&D teams, including IBM, which recently joined, only Zheru can come up with mature and stable solutions for actual operation.But precisely because of this, the competition has become increasingly fierce, making it difficult to predict the outcome.

In short, companies that were already at odds with each other because of commercial interests, after being attracted by the World Wide Web to form a circle, it became more and more commonplace for each other to fight each other. The situation of chaotic wars made people dig all kinds of news all the year round. Many IT media feel dazzled and at a loss.

As the pioneer of the World Wide Web, Zheru has naturally become the center of the vortex of competition. It is inevitable that his products will be sliced ​​and researched by his peers in order to transform them into their own intellectual property rights. The pressure he feels can be imagined.

Fortunately, Zheru has a big boss who has returned to sit in person, and his response is to take the initiative to attack—attack is the best defense, and it released new products again.

The application field involved this time is email, which has long been mature on the Internet and is the most widely used. People are increasingly inseparable from it.

With the opening of the World Wide Web, Zheru's email management system Zerone_Exchange_Server_1990 and the supporting email client Zerone_SmartMail have the most powerful functions to date. The most obvious evidence is the support for related protocols such as SMTP and POP3. full support.

(End of this chapter)