Rebirth of the Tech Madman

Jobs has always wanted to create an extraordinary product, and the GUI of PARC is exactly what he dreamed of. Therefore, among the crowd who came to visit, Jobs was the most excited. He made no secret that he would promote the commercialization of Apple. intent of this technique.

Tang Huan originally wanted to give Jobs some professional advice when he left.

For example, in order to ensure the system performance of the graphical user interface, the CPU should directly choose Motorola's MC68000, and other problems that will be faced in the development of such projects, so as to avoid unnecessary detours.

From the bottom of his heart, Tang Huan still hopes that Apple can launch MAC more smoothly than in his previous life, so as to share the competitive pressure brought by IBM.

But Jobs was only concerned about excitedly pulling Atkinson to make his ambition—we also want to build a computer like this, so he ignored Tang Huan and quickly got into the car to continue the discussion.

Seeing this scene, Tang Huan shook his head helplessly. Since we can't urinate in one pot, then everyone can develop on their own.

Because the big boss behaved calmly, Zheru's group of visitors also remained calm. Many engineers thought about the projects they were engaged in, and felt that the development philosophy that Tang Huan instilled in them on weekdays, and It is not worse than PARC. This trip compares and refers to it, which shows that Zheru is in a leading position in technology.

After returning to the company, Tang Huan naturally had a meeting to summarize the gains of the trip.

Have you found out that PARC's technical concept, especially in terms of software, is not unfamiliar to us. Tang Huan said in his opening remarks.

Seeing that everyone nodded in sympathy, Tang Huan continued, That means that this excellent laboratory has been established for nearly ten years and has produced many technological achievements. Their researchers have thought of it with us. Zheru's technical direction is correct.

Tang Huan was very arrogant and put PARC in a subordinate position, but this speaking skill further strengthened the confidence of Zheru employees.

After Apple saw the GUI, it was like a treasure. That technology is indeed excellent, but I feel that PARC's network technology also needs to be paid attention to. Who remembers the name of this network? Tang Huan tested intentionally.

Ethernet. Many people answered in unison like elementary school students.

There is no doubt that PARC's network concept will be the trend of computer development. Tang Huan nodded with satisfaction, But these things will take time to digest, and now they can only be used as a toy for people to appreciate, but the mouse can be used as soon as possible. Developed to make our customers work more conveniently.

Tang Huan was very calm. He roughly sorted out the many technical achievements of PARC according to the long-term, mid-term, and immediate practical application methods, and asked everyone to express some opinions. Finally, he announced the adjournment of the meeting and ordered the recording personnel to sort out The content of the meeting, so that it can be used as a result and distributed to all employees for learning, so as to reach a consensus.

In terms of management model, Zheru is somewhat similar to Intel, with strict organization and clear rules. The whole enterprise is like a tightly running machine, which is in stark contrast to those typical Silicon Valley companies.

Although some creativity may be lost due to this, it has ensured stability, allowing Zheru to maintain order in the rapid expansion of scale, and did not let Gates see the jokes of chaos and collapse.

Among the many means, creating one's own corporate culture is undoubtedly very important.

In Zheru,

A special feature is that no matter what position they belong to, employees will be required to learn the results of discussions in certain meetings.

After dealing with this link, Tang Huan came to the R\u0026D department again, this time he focused on the development of C language programming tools.

Like the hardware bus, the C language is Tang Huan's software technical reserve for the second-generation Fangyuan computer. He saw the completed report from the regularly submitted documents, so he came here to confirm it.

Originally this job was very difficult, but thanks to the well-developed open source community in his previous life, Tang Huan successfully wrote a highly mature C language specification and a stable Intel8086 CPU version compiler The core, named ZeroneCrossPlatformC or Zheru CPC, was handed over to a special five-person team to be responsible for the follow-up development of Motorola MC68000 version, primary function library, etc. according to the roadmap.

In the first edition of The C Programming Language, published in 1978 by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Collinghan. Introduces the C language standard.

Tang Huan's C language specification is compatible with this standard, but also made many improvements.

For example, considering that although Motorola has a 16-bit CPU as its opponent, its internal registers are 32 bits, which is actually a 32-bit microprocessor, and that in the next few years, personal computers will soon enter the era of 32-bit CPUs, so Tang Huan It supports more comprehensive and reasonable data type definition.

As for the features that ensure the execution efficiency of C language, such as pointers and inline assembly language, after making security restrictions, they are fully inherited.

ZeroneMacroAssemble, Zheru MA, is the company's current main development environment, but it will gradually transition to a model where Zheru CPC is the mainstay and MA is the supplement.

If the former is characterized by macros, then the latter is cross-platform.

After the hardware level is further improved, Tang Huan will introduce features such as object-oriented, template library, etc. one after another.

But it is estimated that by that time, there will be fewer places where I need to do it myself.

In order to verify the project results, the group developed a scientific calculator program. The same source code was compiled into Intel8086 and MC68000 programs on the development platforms provided by Intel and Motorola, and then run.

For a tool as complex as a compiler, whether the development is successful or not requires a comprehensive evaluation, but Tang Huan judged based on experience that there is basically no problem.

Everyone, your R\u0026D results will be useful soon. The company's next-generation products will be developed using CPC.

Tang Huan first affirmed their work, and then changed the topic, But I have to say sorry, I can only cash out the Christmas red envelopes and project bonuses among the rewards, vacations are impossible, because you will soon start downloading A much more important project.

In the face of a generous salary system and detailed honor rules, Zheru's engineers are very simple, working tirelessly like slaves, and producing products that create sales myths one after another.

The five people in front of them are also real people who have been successfully brainwashed. When they heard about a new job, their eyes immediately showed a frenzied light.

After Tang Huan encouraged them again, he returned to his office and began to think carefully about the development plan of the second-generation Fangyuan computer.

Regardless of whether IBM has really started the chess plan, Zheru must now enter the next-generation product development cycle as soon as possible.

Due to too much information involved in the plan, Tang Huan lived and boarded in the company for the next few days.

In order to reduce the risk, the whole plan is divided into two routes, that is, the microprocessor adopts Intel8086 and MC68000 respectively.

The most obvious difference between the two is that all internal registers, internal and external data buses of Intel8086 are 16-bit wide, which is a complete 16-bit microprocessor. As for the external address bus, it is 20 bits, and the physical addressing space up to 1MB. MC68000 uses 32-bit bus and registers, 24-bit external address bus, and 16MB physical addressing space.

Obviously, only from the surface, MC68000 is more advanced than Intel8086, and it is actually the same.

For example, because the register width of Intel8086 is smaller than the width of the external address bus, in order to be able to access the entire address space, it needs to adopt a special addressing calculation - segment addressing, so it is a bit troublesome, while MC68000 is much better.

In the previous life, even though the MC68000 was finally eliminated from the personal computer market due to technological progress, it is still widely used in industrial control systems, consumer and embedded fields.

It was not until 1996 that Motorola discontinued the MC68000 with HMOS technology.

In Tang Huan's view, the second-generation Xiaobawang game console will basically be derived from the MC68000 branch.

But advanced technology does not necessarily mean market success. Intel's 8086 and Microsoft's DOS illustrate this point, so Tang Huan also regards Intel8086 as a research and development branch.

If both are successful, it will be a big deal to operate in different grades.

Because the current version of the MC68000 instruction set does not support key features such as virtual memory, Tang Huan does not plan to spend too much energy on the multitasking operating system. Like Intel8086, he uses CPC to develop an operating system based on the open source community FreeDOS in his previous life.

Although it will not support the graphical user interface for the time being, it will provide a tool similar to the Windows Explorer in the previous life - DOSShell, to help ordinary users operate the computer more conveniently.

Because the second-generation Fangyuan computer uses a 16-bit CPU, it will bring the development of personal computers into the third generation. In order to let everyone know this clearly, Tang Huan named this project 386 in a playful way. .

The biggest imaginary enemy of the 386 plan is the IBM-PC. Naturally, except for Tang Huan's personal opinion, most of its content is based on the technical indicators of the IBM-PC, making various reasonable supplements and catching up.

The vision brought about by rebirth allowed Tang Huan to know the direction of the entire project and how to divide complex R\u0026D tasks into parallel modules.

Even so, Tang Huan's style is still very stable, and he is not as rash as Jobs asked Atkinson how long will it take to develop a graphical user interface and Atkinson answered six months ignorantly and fearlessly. The R\u0026D cycle is one year.

As long as the mature second-generation Fangyuan computer can be released in the first half of 1981, it should be able to take the lead and fight against IBM-PC.

In the first stage of the 386 plan, Tang Huan planned to set up two groups of about 12 people, and let them make prototypes respectively, and then proceed to the next stage of work after evaluation.

Tang Huan has been cats in the office these days, which naturally aroused the curiosity of the employees.

When the bearded and unkempt Tang Huan announced the meeting, the engineers who were called into the meeting room finally knew the answer. It turned out that their boss was planning a big plan to fight against the blue giant.