Rebirth of the Tech Madman

, with you all the way! Since Tang Huan was interested, the meeting was immediately scheduled. The management of Symantec who received the notification did not 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, insights into the industry, and even academic achievements are the deepest reasons for everyone's pilgrimage. hierarchical reasons

Especially after he obtained his Ph.D., he continued to write, and 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. They don’t need to greet you like Master, how many in the old days. The waiter in the restaurant reported the names of the dishes in a smooth manner, and the sense of rhythm has already broken through the boundaries of language barriers

The atmosphere of Silicon Valley is unfettered openness and freedom. The personality of the restaurant has attracted a large number of diners, making it a crowded place.

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 the palm to his 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. After delivering 2 bowls of egg fried rice, the people who were invited to come here were amazed and immediately began to taste it

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 legs of an elephant and the legs of a rabbit' Tang Huan talked about various allusions with great interest, The 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 know the habits and customs of different nationalities and social classes; he is not a psychologist, but he must also learn to observe Good looks and good speech

Everyone was fascinated and praised repeatedly. Gordon Eubanks, chairman of the board of directors of Symantec Corporation, joked by analogy, Our marketing department needs such skills. However, Chinese food is delicious, but if you cook it yourself , the difficulty is too high.”

The production process of Chinese food,

It’s really not easy to master. Just take the oil and salt as an example, it’s often based on experience, and it’s almost enough, but you definitely want to be able to clearly quantify the difference between how many milliliters and how many grams. It’s like comparing fuzzy mathematics that has just emerged to classical mathematics.” Tang Huan's witty remark made everyone laugh, and the atmosphere became more and 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 company's lack of actual main business and too weak dilemma

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

Moreover, 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 the chairman of the company's board of directors, Fern Rayburn as the CEO 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 has started to improve its management because of Tang Huan's golden thigh, its current management is full of talents

When the Symantec team came to see Tang Huan, they were still a little uneasy. Only Gordon Eubanks was quietly thinking about it in his heart. As a result, when the two sides met, the unexpected joy he was expecting came true. up

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 by your side. Gordon Eubanks suppressed the ecstasy in his heart and replied calmly

Undoubtedly, the acquaintance between Gordon Eubanks and Tang Huan is conducive to enhancing the cooperative relationship between the two parties, and can also 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 Crd. Since he successively developed the word processing software WrdEas, he was directly defeated by his competitor, Seymour Rubenstein, the owner of another word processing software WrdStar. 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 seized the market opportunity, 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 His BASIC compiler was chosen

However, BASIC-E is a result of research and development with the help of public resources, and it cannot be used for commercial sales as usual. Gordon Eubanks' solution is simply to introduce another function based on BASIC-E The strong compiler CBASIC finally made the business of IMSAI

With this good start, Gordon Eubanks founded his own company to operate CBASIC and formed 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 problems that cannot be ignored in the accuracy required for financial function calculations.

However, CBASIC also has new features that Microsoft BASIC does not have. Gordon Eubanks introduced the mechanism of intermediate code P-deahe to it. This technology is actually the predecessor of Btede used by the famous JAVA more than ten years later in time and space. , even the most popular quick application development tool Microsoft VsualBASIC generates similar intermediate code by default when compiling the program

In addition to being independent of specific machine codes, P-deahe can also protect the intellectual work of programmers

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. When Gates entered the field of operating systems as a counterattack, Gary Kildall acquired the company of his student Gordon Eubanks, making CBASIC is integrated in Digital Research's operating system CP/M

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

Seeing the obvious decline of Digital Research Company and the gloomy future, Gordon Eubanks flew out solo to find another way out, and it was really quiet for a while

Now seeing Tang Huan, who has been separated for five years, so high and high-spirited, Gordon Eubanks is very hot in his heart, especially when the other party still remembers that he is like a huge opportunity

The rest of Symantec, seeing that the chairman of the board of directors, Gordon Eubanks, was able to easily establish friendship with Tang Huan, they were naturally extremely excited, and they subconsciously followed his lead in speech and behavior more and more.

Tang Huan also brought a person to accompany him. His name is Peter Norton. He is an excellent programmer and author of computer books, and he has similar interests.

Therefore, Tang Huan invested and helped Peter Norton establish a cross-platform system tool software company named PeterNrtCputg, I

Peter Norton has worked for some large institutions including Boeing and Jet Propulsion Laboratory for more than ten years. He has been exposed to mainframes and minicomputers for a long time, 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 have not been abandoned. After being moved by ordinary people, he quickly adapted to the technological development of the personal computer industry

Under Tang Huan's suggestion, Peter Norton developed the system program NrtUtltes - 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 the files that were accidentally deleted; the latter can identify the information of various personal computer hardware devices, and has become an indispensable assistant in the evaluation of major computer professional media

This kind of system tools must serve as many computer users as possible, and support hardware platforms such as Fangyuan Computer, IBM-PC, Apple Computer, etc., so it is not suitable to stay in the system of Zheru and Fangyuan. stand up and develop

A set of NrtUtltes is currently priced at 00 US dollars, and last year's sales exceeded 1 million US dollars. They are also small companies that have been in business for less than three years. They are better than Symantec, which has been researching and developing artificial intelligence but has been unable to bring actual commercial profits. one and a half

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

Seeing them chatting enthusiastically, Tang Huan couldn't help but feel amused, and he didn't know what kind of chemical reaction would spontaneously occur after the two companies got acquainted. In terms of commercial operation ability, Peter Norton is obviously far inferior to Gordon Eubank This team of Adams just happened to meet the current business opportunity and has not encountered enough competitors to snatch it up.

After the pleasantries, Tang Huan and Gary Hendricks talked about the topic of artificial intelligence Zheru also has similar projects here, 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 insightful of

Compared with the artificial intelligence that is easily experienced by ordinary consumers such as Apple Sr-Apple Voice Assistant, MrsftCrtaa-Microsoft Cortana, Microsoft Xiaoice, etc. relatively cold

Artificial intelligence research and development has been sought after by various countries since the beginning, and they have invested a lot of money. However, 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, made a big move. Its Ministry of International Trade and Industry announced in 1998 that it would allocate 800 million U.S. dollars to support a large-scale research and development plan called Fifth Generation Computer. A machine that talks to people, translates languages, interprets images, and can reason like humans. The main programming language used in this project is Prlg

Other countries followed suit: the UK started the £300 million Alve project; an American business association organized MreletrsadCputerTehlgCrprat - Microelectronics and Computer Technology Group, which provides funding for large-scale projects in AI and information technology ; DARPA under the US Department of Defense - Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency also took action, organized StrategyCputgItatve - Strategic Computing Promotion Association, actively investing in AI projects

The field of artificial intelligence is too broad and profound. In a 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 super-difficult versions with slightly more codes in the luxury packages of some classic games to satisfy players' challenging psychology.

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

Symantec's natural language artificial intelligence response program Q≈A is an 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 and said: Actually, artificial intelligence should be able to help computers to a certain extent. The system judges which operational behaviors are 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. Feedback from the service department Look, more and more prank programs are starting to run quietly in the computer. No one knows when it will break out and really threaten the data security of users. I must make preparations for the rainy day from now on.”

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 proved that Don's grasp of the industry is extremely precise. Now that Symantec has been guided, we will certainly not miss this opportunity. Gordon Eubanks' eyes sparkled and he expressed his opinion enthusiastically, However, Symantec’s capital flow is still tight, and if it wants to launch a research and development plan, it will continue to consider introducing investors.”

Are you 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. How about we play a few games? So, as long as you win, investing is just a matter of words.”

Barry Greenstein rubbed his hands together and smiled confidently, Then I'm sorry (to be continued)