American Entertainment 1982

Chapter 296 Facing the future

 Winton Cerf's advertising design ability was touted by Tommy, and it was not without purpose. In fact, in 1982, Winton Cerf participated in MCI's TV advertising brainstorming meeting by chance and boredom.

After work, he went to the MCI rest room to read the latest comic book to relax his mind. He happened to hear several other MCI executives discussing work during the break, arguing about what style of film MCI should make. Only when the advertisement is put on the market can it achieve a similar effect to the TV advertisement launched by AT&T last year.

In 1981, AT&T shot a TV commercial with a quality comparable to that of a mini-movie. The entire commercial was full of humanistic care. Once launched, the market share of long-distance calls increased by 5%. This also led many telecommunications service providers to follow suit and wanted to Repeat this success.

Winton has seen AT&T's classic advertising video, which is actually a story about the relationship between mother and son. A son calls his mother in his hometown in a foreign land. The son chokes up during the call and cares about his mother. The mother asks her son softly, and the two His superb acting skills seemed very touching. The climax was when the mother asked her son why he kept choking up when he called her. The son replied, "It's just because I love you." Finally, there is a brief narration: AT&T, for only 70 cents, let love span thousands of miles.

As an upright science man, Winton has always felt that this commercial video is useless. His hometown is New Haven, Connecticut, but now he has been staying on the other side of the United States in California, so he often needs to use long-distance calls to talk to his parents. People know better than him what emotions they feel when chatting with family members on long-distance calls, and whether the two parties will be speechless and choked with warmth.

So he told a few colleagues in the break room who were full of praise for AT&T's advertisements that AT&T's advertisements could only use the so-called humanistic care to deceive those who rarely used long-distance calls, but could not convince those who frequently used long-distance calls. Emotional resonance among users.

 Then he showed his colleagues what a real long-distance phone call would be like between a mother and her son. He dialed his mother's number.

“Wynton~ What are you calling back for?!!” The woman’s phone with the hands-free button ringing was loud enough to make the entire rest room echo.

Winton responded to the phone in a voice not much lower than his mother's: "Mom! I wear a hearing aid! You don't have to be so loud! You scared my colleagues! Keep it down! I can hear you clearly." What did you say!"

“That’s good! Hang up! Long-distance phone calls are too expensive! If you have anything to do, try to write a letter!” The professor’s mother yelled at the other end of the country, and then simply hung up the phone.

After the demonstration, the professor looked at his colleagues: "Which mother do you think can talk to her son tenderly for three minutes like in the advertisement, and still allow her son to waste most of the time choking? If I want to film MCI TV For the commercial, we simply invited the pair of AT&T commercial actors to come over and re-shoot an identical scene of a mother-son call, except that the son’s last line was replaced. When the mother asked her son why he was crying, the son told her: because AT& T’s long distance phone bill is too expensive.”

“Finally, change the narration to: MCI, the price of making love span thousands of miles is as low as 50 cents per minute.”

He just regarded his words as casual chat when relaxing, and went back to drink coffee and read comics after he finished speaking. As a result, after a private discussion, several heads of MCI felt that Professor Cerf's proposal was very good, and ran to find him again a few days later. Winton Cerf, asked him to repeat the last two sentences he said that day, confirming that they were original to Winton, because they were going to use them in the commercial.

Only then did Winton know that these guys contacted the advertising production company and invited back the actors who shot the AT&T commercial and re-filmed an MCI version of a mother-son conversation. The audience had previously watched the AT&T version of the mother-son conversation. , is a heart-warming film that reminds people that love for family members can span thousands of miles.

 MCI's version is a more effective comedy, ending with the two lines that Winton Cerf came up with.

When it was released, the audience initially thought it was a replay of a classic ad, but it was not until the lines were reversed at the end that they discovered it was a new ad for MCI, another long-distance phone service provider, and easily remembered the message this ad wanted to tell them. It's just that AT&T's long-distance calls are too expensive, and MCI's long-distance calls only cost 50 cents per minute.

In the year when the ad went online, MCI's long-distance call market share increased by 6%, and together with AT&T's ad, it became the only long-distance call ad that American audiences remembered in that era. Many advertisers commented that the idea was clever and comparable to Pepsi. Battle with delicious classic advertising.

MCI Chairman McGowan bought all the game consoles and games on the market and personally gave them to Professor Winton Cerf to thank him for providing MCI with excellent advertising ideas.

Tommy can understand his professor's interest. He doesn't like to devote himself wholeheartedly to helping others design advertisements. He just uses this as a small game to relax and change his mind. And he likes to do it very much. This kind of small act of inspiration has been said many times in class that when the software industry flourishes and the Internet becomes popular, there will be more and more incidents like the one where he helped MCI plan advertisements but became very successful when he was bored. , because the Internet allows many people around the world to witness mediocre ordinary people showing their extraordinary inner nature through a flash of inspiration. This is the charm of the Internet, breaking distance and space, telling the world that you are extraordinary.

He even predicted early on that with the development of computer software, hardware and the Internet, many junk movies would have the opportunity to be remade. There would be professional movie fans who would adjust those ugly movies through software, re-interpret them and put them online. Let everyone compare and appreciate, let everyone see how garbage can be turned into gold, and the fans are better than the directors.

“What do you want to advertise for, Tommy? Your pure soul?” Winton finished reading the magazine, raised his head and asked Tommy with a smile.

Tommy sat across from him and spread his hands: "Jason has been urging me to get AmigaOS for two years."

Professor Winton recalled it for a moment before realizing that this thing was a graphical operating system software that Tommy's gang had picked up before.

As early as 1982, when almost all computers were still operating with text commands, five programmers from the Atari Game Company jumped out and established the Amiga Company because they were dissatisfied with Atari and prepared to independently develop a new game console.

Amiga means female friend in Spanish. In addition to wanting to confuse his work with other bad terms used in the computer industry, the name also represents the importance that the five game otakus attach to this venture and put the game console they created into Cherished like a girlfriend.

The company's initial start-up capital came from a dentist in Florida who liked to play Atari games. When several guys were working at Atari, the dentist would often contact them to discuss the plot of the game or report bugs in the game promptly. On the other side, after learning that these guys were starting a business, the dentist found two friends who were also dentists. The three dentists pooled together 100,000 yuan to support the Amiga company in developing a more fun game console.

When the Amiga Company, which had a huge capital of 100,000 yuan, was ambitious, it happened to be when Tommy drove a shabby old car and entered Stanford University as a freshman. The two parties happened to come to Stanford together. Tommy was studying at Stanford University, and Amiga Five The group started a business in the Stanford Industrial Park, also known as Silicon Valley.

 A year later, Tommy reached the first peak of his life with OSS and his autobiography, while the Amiga entrepreneurial five were just the opposite. They encountered the American video game crash of 1983.

This crash was mainly due to the sight of several large companies making money and a large number of small game console developers disorderly flooding into the home game market. The overwhelming number of shoddy games directly weakened gamers' interest in paying for new games and new game consoles. In the first half of 1983, total game sales in the United States were 3.3 billion U.S. dollars. In the second half of the year, they dropped to less than 300 million U.S. dollars. This directly caused the bankruptcy of dozens of small game console manufacturers and low-end home game computer manufacturers who wanted to grab money. Nearly two thousand game companies went bankrupt. The hall is closed.

The five otakus of the Amiga company originally wanted to build their dream game console, but they were hit on the head when they first started their business. One hundred thousand dollars was not enough to support the prototype until the prototype was released. They originally wanted to use it when the research and development reached a certain stage. As a result, I went to the capital market to find new investors, but now the gaming industry is facing a collapse. Many investors with cash in hand didn't even bother to pick up their business cards and left on the spot when they heard that a game development company was looking for investment.

As for the first three Florida dentists, they are now completely suffocated by the investment they made for their dreams. In order to prevent a few guys from calling them to appeal for additional investment, they even changed their phone numbers.

In order to find new investors, Jay Miner, the leader of the five-person group and the founder of Amiga, came up with an idea. The game industry collapsed, but the computer software industry was booming. We did not mention that we were industry insiders in the game industry. Wouldn't it be nice if you were someone from the computer industry? After rummaging through the materials that I spent money on research and development before, I found that only the Amiga-Dos disk operating system was barely related to computer software. This system was originally developed for game console users, and it also thoughtfully added a graphics library and developed graphics The purpose of the operation interface is to allow users to more intuitively understand how to get started with the game console through the icons on the screen when turning on the game console, and to reduce the time spent reading various instructions in the instructions.

So he changed this thing into a new one, claiming it was a new generation of graphical computer operating system, and embarked on the road of looking for unfair investors. The first evil investor he identified was the popular fried chicken of Stanford University that year. Tommy Hawke became a millionaire in his autobiography.

Jay Miner's idea at the time was very simple. Tommy Hawke was a freshman who developed OSS document processing software. He was also a nerd who came from the freshman period. He understood what these computer genius students were like. You must like to play games and have a crush on pretty girls. You should have a lot in common with the other five otakus. Moreover, such people suddenly become rich. They should not be hesitant about spending money and are prone to impulsive spending. Seeing as everyone is in the nerd group. A genius, how could he swindle tens of thousands of dollars out of the other party's pocket to help him out.

With this preconceived stereotype in mind, I specifically asked my SSD friends from my alma mater, University of California, Berkeley, to help me make connections, and then I made an appointment with Tommy and Jason from Stanford University.

As soon as the Amiga operating system was shown, Jason angrily scolded the five nerds for cheating money. Isn't this just a DOS game console interface with a graphics shell added on? There are still game joystick icons that have not been deleted. Which computer operating system does not consider optimization and first consider adding a function to adapt to the game joystick in its system?

Jay had lost all hope after hearing Jason's reaction, and Tommy and Jason didn't look like the nerds they had imagined before.

Unexpectedly, Tommy seemed to be easy to deceive and stopped Jason from continuing. Instead, he asked about various details of the development, including user interfaces, window menus, and other professional issues on how to complete the call implementation. Jay saw When the other party asks questions in a sincere tone, I can only bite the bullet and continue to draw in the direction of the operating system. As long as it relies on a suitable chip, it can achieve multi-tasking and has powerful graphics processing capabilities.

 Then, under the obstruction of Jason, Tommy resolutely stated that he would invest in this operating system and invest financial support in batches according to the research and development progress. It was tentatively scheduled for five years, with the first investment of 500,000.

 Afterwards, Jay Miner recalled that the contract he signed was more like exchanging dreams for dollars.

Although Amiga has injected new funds, it has completely deviated from its original dream of becoming a world-renowned game company, and instead focused on developing a real computer graphics operating system.

Although Wynton Cerf did not witness that meeting with Jay Miner, he heard Tommy talk about it afterwards. After hearing Tommy's reasons for investing, Wynton Cerf understood that this young man's success was not because of Luck, but vision.

That was at the beginning of 1984. Only Apple computers on the market had a crude graphical interface, and were limited by the monitor and could only display black and white. As for other computer systems, whether they were Windows or Unix, they were all still unfamiliar to computers. Ordinary people would feel a headache just looking at the character command line interface.

When Tommy was chatting with him at that time, he said that the graphical interface of the operating system is the key to making computers a necessity for ordinary households. You cannot let consumers learn various tedious DOS commands in order to buy computers, but let the computers Learn to adapt to consumers, so that it no longer looks arrogant and does not allow strangers to enter.

It wasn't until 1987, a month after Microsoft launched Windows 2.0, that it took nearly a hundred Stanford University graduates from related majors five years to polish AmigoOS 1.0, which relied on Benjamin Rosen's Compaq and Stephen Bean's Dell. computer manufacturers enter the market.

It is more colorful than the Apple system and more intuitive to operate than Windows 2.0. The only disadvantage is that it can only match the 386 chip that Intel just launched less than two years ago, while the other two operating systems that occupy a huge market are based on the lower-end 32 bit processor runs smoothly.

So at that time, this system was only bundled with high-end machines priced at more than 1,800 yuan from Compaq and Dell, and was not sold separately. Only about 60,000 high-end computers equipped with the AmigoOS system were sold on the market. , and some of them are still in the European market. There are only about 40,000 units in the United States.

At that time, Amgia had already implemented functions such as multi-tasking windowing, screen layout changes, task manager, writing pad, drawing, printer matching manager, schedule manager, etc. It also had built-in OSS that allowed non-professionals to handle daily documents. software and two mini-games that reflect system fluency and powerful graphics.

Winton knew that Jason, Jay and others had approached Tommy many times. Jason even asked him to persuade Tommy to agree to optimize and even streamline AmigaOS so that the system could be used on lower-end computers. And then quickly entered the low-end computer market.

However, he was rejected by Tommy every time. As a result, Jason had quarrels with Tommy on the phone every now and then. He was even so stressed that he went to see a psychiatrist. After all, everyone realized that AmigaOS was a better system. , even senior executives from Compaq and Dell came to Jason and Jay, hoping to run this great operating system on mid- to low-end computers.

"Two months ago, Intel announced that its latest 486 processor would be available in unlimited quantities, so the 386 processor was reduced to a low- to mid-range price that ordinary families could afford, and then you came back to sell the Amiga?" Winton Cerf sighed: "Quinn is really right about you. You are like a fly. Only the smell of money can make you appear."

"No, it's not just that. I've been waiting for so long, not for a big price cut on processors, but for the returns from my continuous donations in these buildings over the years. I want to build a graphical web browser into AmigaOS and exempt myself from annual expenses for a year. The free MCI-Mail software program, I want everyone to go back and connect the phone line, so that you can use the Amiga to open the door to a new world." Tommy looked at Winton Cerf with gleaming eyes, his eyes full of heat:

“Also, I guess Professor you won’t pay attention to other small things, such as web browsers supporting interactive hypertext and hyperlinks, etc. Related patents have been registered and held by Stanford University and are protected by the U.S. Constitution.”

"You know this kind of patent rights that you let Stanford University get in advance. It is impossible for the court to support the claims held by Stanford in the end. Even if there are no other companies to lobby, it is impossible to support it, because that means the working environment of the Internet and browsers. , the way of working will be forced to change." After hearing Tommy say that Stanford University registered and held the patent rights of those successfully developed, Professor Winton said with certainty.

Some of those projects are actually standards-setting work for packet network interconnection. If these things are patented by Stanford University and finally recognized by the U.S. court as patent rights, he, as the chairman of the International Information Processing Federation, will be the first to do so. Standing up to object, he was sure that the court would not recognize the validity of the patent rights in the end, so he could calmly tell Tommy that even if those patent rights needed to be slowly reviewed and adjudicated temporarily due to the lack of relevant regulatory rights and relevant references, there was only one final result. It was deemed invalid.

 “I know,” said Tommy.

This answer made Wynton couldn't help but take off his glasses, and he looked at Tommy in confusion:

"Son, I have met many computer practitioners. Some of them support Internet freedom and openness, and some are opposed to Internet freedom and openness, but you are the most contradictory one. You work hard to promote the Communications Law's control of Internet information and regulatory rights. Definition, it seems like someone who hopes that the Internet will truly usher in openness and freedom, but now you tell me that you have set up very powerful obstacles to Internet freedom, and you deliberately let Stanford University submit the key to the Internet world, that is The browser-related patent rights look like those who oppose Internet freedom, so tell me, is Internet freedom and openness more important to you, or is Internet closure more important to you?"

Tommy shrugged: "Whether the Internet is free or not is not important to me. It is important to me whether the Internet belongs to me and whether it belongs to Stanford."

 “So?” Wenton asked with a half-smile.

“So, if users use the keys given to them by Stanford to open the door to the Internet, then the Internet can be free and open to them. If other manufacturers want to use their keys to help users open the door to the Internet, what Stanford has to do is, It just shuts out all those manufacturers and users until the user changes the key provided by Stanford and opens the door again." Tommy leaned forward and approached his professor:

“I want the viewers who see this advertisement to understand one thing, that is, by choosing AmigaOS, they can sit at home and face the future.”

"You have to use the FCC's non-discriminatory regulatory provisions and the patent rights you let Stanford University hold to delay as much as possible the time when Apple and Microsoft's operating software that occupies a large market share can help ordinary users open the door to the Internet. Use this period Time quickly devours the market." Winton sighed depressingly. As the godfather of the Internet, this **** has made his words so clear. How could he not be clear about Tommy's purpose:

"You didn't choose to hold the patent yourself, not because you are generous enough, but because you understand that if you hold those **** patents, those big companies will not care at all and will directly launch the infringement and plagiarism quickly, but if the holder is Stanford Universities, if they dare to infringe on the legal rights of Stanford University before the court rules that this patent that hinders the development of the industry is invalid, Stanford University and its large group of working alumni can make Microsoft, Apple and even IBM understand what it means to be miserable. .”

 (End of this chapter)