Rebirth of the Tech Madman

Chapter 43 Father of Chinese Computer

The office of the Baodao branch of Zheru is next to Jian Mingren and Wang Xueling’s public computers, and a small number of employees are interleaved in their posts.

According to Tang Huan’s vision, Fangyuan Computer’s operations in Baodao follow a localization strategy, which is basically handed over to Volkswagen Computers, which can avoid a lot of unnecessary troubles, and the business scope of the Zheru branch will be more comprehensive. some.

Tang Huan inspected it for a while and was quite satisfied. It was just that Volkswagen’s current focus was entirely on the Fangyuan computer, and some ignored the Xiaobawang game console, which made him a little unhappy.

But it’s no wonder that the mass launch of Fangyuan Computers is destined to promote the advancement of social informatization, and under the special situation of Baodao, it will happen to win the favor of some people, so that fame and fortune will be gained, and the motivation will naturally be even greater. Enough.

Zheru American Headquarters produced some prototypes, most of which were shipped to Baodao by plane and placed in the office of Volkswagen Computer for customers to display. The factory in Hsinchu Science and Technology Park is still in the process of assembling and debugging equipment. Here is an order. It has been stacked very high, which shows the degree of market popularity.

A group of people are visiting now, and they are personally accompanied by Jian Mingren.

“Mr. Tang, that is Mr. Zhu Bangfu, the inventor of Cangjie Input Method.” Shi Chongtang introduced softly.

Tang Huan screamed unexpectedly. He didn’t expect to meet this great man in the history of Chinese computer development, who was hailed as the “Father of Chinese Computers” by the Chinese in Baodao and Xiangjiang.

Zhu Bangfu was born in 1937. His father was an influential figure in the military and political circles.

In his childhood, Zhu Bangfu moved to and fro due to wars, and finally settled on a treasure island when he was enrolled in middle school, then went to Brazil to develop, and he also stayed in the United States for a period of time. During this period, his mother and father died successively.

When Zhu Bangfu worked at the Brazilian Culture Publishing House, he witnessed how the Chinese printing technology lags behind in comparison with English in the publishing process of a book, so he switched to the improvement of Chinese printing technology.

In 1973, Zhu Bangfu returned to Baodao. In the following years of hard life, he developed Chinese retrieval methods and improved Chinese printing technology with a Chinese typewriter as a practical goal according to his ideas.

Later, with the assistance of Ms. Shen Honglian, at the end of 1976, Zhu Bangfu invented the Chinese Xingyi Checking Method that uses 52 letters as the search key, that is, “Cangjie Input Method”. Zhu Bangfu, who doesn’t understand computers, has been exposed to computer programming languages ​​from this time.

At present, with the help of friends, Zhu Bangfu has established a computer company to develop Chinese terminals.

Because microcomputers are not yet popular and practical, Zhu Bangfu has attracted a lot of negative criticism from the society.

The business community is not optimistic about the Chinese computer market and is unwilling to invest; scientific and technological personnel in the academic circle advocate the elimination of Chinese as soon as possible.

Zhu Bangfu suffered all the ridicule. His situation can be described as isolation and helplessness.

But now, Fangyuan Computer was born, and the tangible functions are in front of you. Whoever dares to question the computer processing of Chinese information is to be slapped, and Zhu Bangfu, who is still in the stage of technical exploration, found the guidance. Direction of the lighthouse.

“Mr. Tang, admiring your name for a long time, it is a great blessing to meet you.”

After seeing Tang Huan, Zhu Bangfu took the initiative to welcome him without introduction, “The Fangyuan computer you invented is a great innovation.”

“Mr. Zhu passed the award, I am really ashamed of it.” Tang Huan immediately greeted him with enthusiasm.

According to the original historical development, in 1980, with the technical support of Shi Zhenrong, Zhu Bangfu and Acer jointly developed a Chinese computer with “Chinese operating system, Chinese programming language, and Chinese package software”-Tianlong Chinese Computer, priced at 750,000 yuan Taiwan dollar. But obviously, it’s impossible for a personal computer with a value of $20,000 to win the market.

The following year, Zhu Bangfu launched a Chinese terminal. After that, he established Zero One Computer Company to provide manufacturers with low-cost computer cultural services.

In order to make Chinese computers more popular and let the Chinese people study together, Zhu Bang’s post-reporting statement abandons the patent right of Cangjie input method, announcing that he is willing to make all the technology public, and sell the shares of Zero One at a price of NT 10 million.

Relevant parties in Baodao agreed with this proposal and entrusted the technicians from Wang An, Acer, and Shentong to conduct detailed identification at Zero One, and Zhu Bangfu gave a public explanation. The proposal was finally passed, and the final result of the acquisition was planned to be determined in 1983.

But during this period, there was a dispute between the 13,000-character Big5 code developed by the relevant authorities of Baodao and Zhu Bangfu’s Chinese coding system that can accommodate more than 50,000 characters.

In addition, it was reported that Zhu Bangfu’s system was also promoted to the mainland. Therefore, Zhu Bangfu left Baodao in April 1983, took refuge in the United States, and transferred all ownership of Zero One to employees.

Since then, Zhu Bangfu has been farther and farther away from his ideal of computer processing of Chinese information.

But anyway, Zhu Bang is a legend.

Looking at Zhu Bangfu, who is in his early forties and full of spirits, Tang Huan thinks of his gains and losses in the Chinese information computer processing business, and he can’t help but feel sorry for him.

If a computer wants to process various information in binary, it must use coding technology to identify various basic components.

In this regard, Western languages ​​like English, which have only 26 basic letters and can be encoded with only a 128-bit ASCII table, have a natural advantage, while Chinese is much more troublesome.

From the perspective of logical structure, although Chinese characters can be divided into different basic components such as radicals and radicals, there are too many, far more than 26. Moreover, when these basic components are composed of Chinese characters, there are still positions, directions, and orientations. Variety.

Therefore, it is difficult to classify and process Chinese information based on the text structure.

Some radical technicians even use this to advocate the elimination of Chinese characters. For China, who invented papermaking and printing, this phenomenon is a bit sad.

On the road to overcome these difficulties, many famous Chinese have emerged, such as Zhu Bangfu, Ni Guangnan, Wang Xuan, Wang Yongmin, etc. It can be said that it took more than ten years to gradually solve this problem.

As a rebirth, Tang Huan naturally wants to shorten this process so that the Chinese have more time to pay attention to other aspects of technology such as operating systems and networks.

First of all, Tang Huan has planned a set of coding schemes including simplified characters and traditional fonts-Tang Code, which directly covers the contents of GB-2312 and Big5 in the original time and space.

With the strong popularity of Fangyuan Computer, Tang Code will inevitably become the industry standard, even the official standard.

Secondly, in terms of input method, Tang Huan chose the simple and easy-to-use Pinyin input method.

The basic education in Baodao is taught by phonetic symbols. Traditional characters are phonetic input methods, while simplified characters are Chinese pinyin input methods.

Of course, the workload of the entire project is very large. Tang Huan cannot complete it by himself, and it is not necessary. He only planned out a general framework, realized the groundbreaking and core module functions, and then arranged it concisely. Ren is going to work on traditional characters. As for the work on simplified characters, Tang Huan is looking for another person to advance. I believe my aunt will recommend a suitable candidate for herself.

However, these difficulties are only intellectual software expenses, and hardware costs must also be taken into consideration.

After the text is sorted and coded according to certain rules and can be retrieved by input method, it is still not a good thing. In order to display them, the computer must also arrange a matching storage space, which contains an ASCII table of 26 basic English letters. Not much, but a font library containing thousands of Chinese characters is expensive.

For example, in order for Epson’s 7-pin dot matrix printer to print Chinese characters, the print head must follow the setting of the 12×12 dot matrix font library and divide the odd and even lines twice to complete the printing of a Chinese character.

In this font library, the dot matrix information of a Chinese character requires 32 bytes of storage space.

Jian Mingren’s traditional font library contains nearly 10,000 characters. After roughly counting, the required storage space reaches 320K, which is an overhead that a microcomputer cannot afford.

You know, mainstream 8-bit CPUs, such as Intel’s 8080, Zilog’s Z80, Motorola’s 6800, and MOSTechnology’s 6502, have a maximum addressing address space of 64K. Apple’s current hot-selling second-generation machine is only equipped with 48KB of memory.

Tang Huan saw this situation, so he had to go into battle again, using data compression technology to reduce the space occupied by the Chinese character library to an acceptable level, so that it could be commercialized.

Fortunately, during this period, Japan’s electronics industry developed rapidly. The prices of various components dropped rapidly, and costs and profits could be balanced. This was one of the main reasons why Tang Huan left the United States and went to Asia to set up factories.

Therefore, in the original historical time and space, the computer informationization of Chinese characters is very tortuous.

It’s all right now. Tang Huan set the direction and framework at the initial stage. Although no one has realized the great work of this work, time will tell everything. It doesn’t matter if you temporarily hide your merits and fame.

Comparing Tang Huan and Zhu Bangfu’s practices on Chinese information computer processing, we can find that Tang Huan, who is proficient in technology trends and well versed in market rules, is relatively pragmatic, while Zhu Bangfu is somewhat idealistic.

Of course, if Zhu Bangfu is willing to accept the support provided by Tang Huan in the initial development of personal computers, his comprehensive Chinese information computer processing system with the “six major functions of Chinese characters” of character code, character shape, character sequence, character sound, character meaning, and character recognition The ideal may not be impossible to achieve.

In this way, it is also a great promotion for the preservation and research of various ancient Chinese books.

“I’m telling the truth. Seeing the functions of Fangyuan Computer, I find that my research direction seems to need to be adjusted.” Zhu Bangfu looked at Tang Huan and said sincerely.

Tang Huan pondered slightly, “Mr. Zhu, with all due respect, you may not be good at the underlying computer technology. It is better to concentrate all your energy on the compilation of Chinese coding and the design of the input method, and the hardware will be implemented by a dedicated person. ”

Zhu Bangfu had a puzzled look on his face, “I don’t quite understand the division of labor you said.”

“For example, Fangyuan computer, it has a circuit board inside, I call it a Chinese card, which is specially used to store Chinese character library, process Chinese character input and display Chinese characters. Take out the Chinese card, and Fangyuan computer will be an ordinary English The computer, with the Han card installed, it becomes a Chinese computer.” Tang Huan explained patiently.

Zhu Bangfu nodded suddenly, “In other words, I only need to concentrate on designing another Chinese card that supports Chinese characters more comprehensively, and then install it on the Fangyuan computer. UU Reading www.uukanshu.com”

Tang Huan smiled and nodded. Of course, the specific implementation is not that simple. It also involves the support details of the operating system and other aspects, but the general idea is like this.

“Listening to the Lord’s words is better than reading for ten years. Mr. Tang, how about a few drinks together for dinner, I’ll treat you.” Zhu Bangfu said excitedly.

“It’s natural to ask for it in the next place, but Mr. Zhu is here, and Philosophy should be in charge of the reception.” Tang Huan laughed and turned to Shi Chongtang and said, “Chongtang, arrange a hotel for us later.”

Shi Chongtang nodded in agreement, and then whispered: “Miss Lin is here, right in the office.”

Tang Huan gave an unmoving voice, and then made an apologetic gesture to Zhu Bangfu, “Mr. Zhu, please visit first, and I will deal with other things.”

After leaving, Tang Huan walked back to the office quickly and saw Lin Fengjiao waiting quietly.

“You are not feeling well, why don’t you take a lot of rest.” Tang Huan walked over and raised the beauty’s little hand, and said with concern.

“It doesn’t matter. Seeing you are busy all day long, it must be very tiring. I specially made the soup and sent it to replenish your body.” Lin Fengjiao smiled softly.

Tang Huan took a close look at Lin Fengjiao and saw that the style between her eyebrows and eyes was obviously different from yesterday. He couldn’t help feeling a little proud and satisfied, “Jiaojiao is caring. But from my point of view, you lost too much blood yesterday. Need to nourish the body.”

Hearing Tang Huan’s secretly pointed words, Lin Fengjiao’s neck turned red, and he took Tang Huan’s hand and took a bite, and scolded, “Bad guy.”