Rebirth of the Tech Madman

Chapter 61 After cutting the product, come to dig p

Tang Huan first went to the Japanese office of Zheru Company in Tokyo and asked about various patent copyright declarations. Then he left the frustrated Hu Yinmeng in Tokyo, and drove 200 kilometers with Yaskawa Hideaki. I went to the Epson headquarters in Suwa Nagano to check the progress of new product development.

Because there are many strokes in traditional characters, the effect of outputting 12-dot fonts through a 7-pin dot matrix printer is sometimes not perfect, so Tang Huan has an urgent need for a 9-pin dot matrix printer.

With two more firing pins on the print head, the Chinese character library can be upgraded to 16 dot matrix, which can meet the requirements of printing accuracy in a general range.

As long as he has the foundation of a 9-pin printer, Tang Huan can accept that the 16-pin and 24-pin R&D process is more stable. After all, the products must follow their own cycle. If the seedlings are fueled by a lot, it will be exhausted for various after-sales problems.

Epson’s needle printer is more durable, and the service life of the needle can reach 200 million times. These indicators are achieved step by step by slow work and careful work.

In the original time and space, the TP-80 dot matrix printer that supports 80-column width, its 7-pin model TX-80, was introduced to the market in June 1978 as a system printer for Commodore PET computers, and the improved 9 The needle model MX-80 will not be released until October 1980.

Now it is different. Because of Tang Huan’s insightful eyes, TX-80 has become an important part of the information office solution he constructed, and it has almost become a necessity.

The research and development of the improved model MX-80, under the guidance of Tang Huan, has made rapid progress. Looking at this trend, it is estimated that mass production will be possible by the end of the year.

When the circuit board such as the printing enhancement card is integrated into the printer and supports the Chinese character library, then the MX-80 is not much different from the conventional printer in the previous life.

Tang Huan is very satisfied with the work of these Japanese people, and the purpose of this trip is considered to be more than half achieved.

“By the way, Mr. Yingzhao, is the person I asked you to help look for?” Tang Huan asked.

“There is indeed a planning clerk named Shigeru Miyamoto in Nintendo.” Hideaki Yaskawa nodded, “But this young man looks ordinary. Mr. Tang insists on looking for him, so why?”

“I have accidentally seen the works designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, and I feel that he is just the talent I need.” Tang Huan smiled and replied calmly.

During this period, apart from the rapid economic development in Japan, the cultural output was also very strong, such as unique Zen Taoism, tea ceremony, and derived industrial design, etc. Many Westerners, including all IT bigwigs who were still very young at this time, There was Steve Jobs, all obsessed with it.

Faced with this kind of pursuit, of course the Japanese are proud of it.

Therefore, after listening to Tang Huan’s reasons, Yaskawa Hideaki felt it was a matter of course. Then he enthusiastically accompanied Tang Huan to Kyoto to find Shigeru Miyamoto in person.

……

Compared to the international metropolis Tokyo in Kanto, Kyoto in Kansai is a historical city. From 794 to 1868, it was the capital of Japan. Years of historical accumulation have made Kyoto possess quite a wealth of historical relics, and it has become one of the important towns of Japanese traditional culture.

In addition, Kyoto is also an important industrial city, with the most developed traditional industries and electronic industries. For example, Tang Huan is going to dig a wall for this goal-Nintendo.

Nintendo, founded in 1889 by Bojiro Yamauchi, originally specialized in making a Japanese hand-made card called Hanaza, and this business method continued until the 1960s.

It can be said that Nintendo has been lingering for more than half a century in the inexhaustible business.

In 1929, Yamauchi Fangjiro retired, and his son-in-law, Yamauchi Seiyoshi took over the company.

After two generations of the Yamauchi family, Nintendo has completed its original accumulation.

Yamauchi Shirakura also did not have a son to inherit the family incense, so Inaba Kanosuke, after marrying Yamauchi Kimi, changed his name to Yamauchi Kanosuke in order to take over Nintendo in the future.

But after Yamauchi Yamauchi was born, Yamauchi Kanosuke abandoned his wife and son and eloped with others.

Yamauchi Kimi felt very shameless, so she moved out to live with her younger sister and put Yamauchi to take care of her father.

Yamauchi Jiliang had high expectations for Yamauchi Hakushu, and his teaching was very strict.

In 1945, Yamauchi entered Waseda University to study law, met Michiko Inaba, fell in love and registered for marriage.

Shortly after Yamauchi’s wedding, Yamauchi suffered a stroke. Before his death, Yamauchi hurriedly recruited Yamauchi and asked him to drop out of school and immediately take over as Nintendo.

In 1949, the 22-year-old Yamauchi became the third president of Nintendo.

As soon as the young Yamauchi took the stage, he forced many family members and old employees who had worked for more than 20 years to retire, and introduced new technologies to improve the manufacturing process of playing card products.

Six years later, Nintendo became the largest playing card manufacturing company in Japan.

In 1959, Yamauchi used the opportunity of hosting the Olympic Games in Tokyo to establish a cooperative relationship with Disney and began to produce playing cards featuring Disney cartoons.

With the promotion of TV and magazines, Nintendo sold 630,000 sets of playing cards a year, accounting for 60% of the Japanese card market, equivalent to the total output of Nintendo in the past 15 years.

In 1962, Nintendo’s stock was successfully listed.

But Yamauchi immediately discovered that even if this industry became the world’s number one, it was nothing more than that, so he began to seek company transformation.

From 1963 to 1968, Nintendo established a taxi company and a love hotel chain network, and produced toys, rice, vacuum cleaners and other items, but this diversification was not smooth.

In 1969, Nintendo established the game department, Yokoi Junpei began to make a name for himself. He soon came up with a kind of auxiliary arm toy-super weird hand, and it quickly sold well. It became a hot commodity for Christmas that year, and it was sold around the holiday. 1.4 million sets became the biggest highlight of Nintendo in the late 1960s.

After the first victory, under the auspices of Yokoi Gunpei, Nintendo launched the light gun.

The so-called light gun is a gun-shaped receiving device. The game image in front contains a special signal. The light gun receives the signal to represent a hit.

In 1973, Nintendo expanded the concept of the light gun and developed it into a laser body shooting system. It uses solar cells as sensors, so it can be used during the day, and has become a large-scale entertainment facility in a bowling alley.

At that time, the Japanese bowling fever subsided and a large number of venues were left unused.

Yamauchi took this opportunity, rented a large number of venues after mortgaged the property, launched a laser shooting range, and the crowds of people quickly made Nintendo reap the rewards.

But the good times didn’t last long. Just when Yamauchi had invested heavily in debt and hoped to fight the peak again, the oil crisis broke out.

Almost overnight, people lost their interest in the laser shooting range, the crowd at the venue faded, and overseas orders were cancelled. Nintendo was hit hard.

In 1974, Nintendo used the same light gun concept to improve the shooting system, so that the laser gun game “Wild Gunner” was exported to the United States and Europe.

At this stage, Yamauchi Hashimoto realized that with some technological breakthroughs, the cost and performance of electronic products are already sufficient for the entertainment industry.

In 1975, some companies, such as Atari, where Jobs once worked, achieved initial success in electronic game consoles.

As Japan has fully popularized color TV sets, Yamauchi, who has been paying attention to the new trends in the United States, perceives that electronic game consoles will be Nintendo’s most promising business.

Yamauchi learned that Magnavox, a subsidiary of Philips, already had similar products, and signed an agreement with it to obtain a license to produce and sell the company’s game system in Japan. The other party of this cooperation is Mitsubishi Electric, which is responsible for manufacturing game consoles.

After the original MagnavoxOdyssey came out, Nintendo and Mitsubishi conducted a more in-depth cooperation. They jointly developed ColorTVGame6, namely C**6, and C**15, built-in 15 games including tennis games, and opened it. In the market, cumulative sales exceeded one million units.

In 1977, Nintendo’s business changed, products transformed into electronic entertainment, and semiconductors and microchips were merged together.

In the same year, the 50-year-old Yamauchi, despite the opposition of his mother, announced a change of name from Yamauchi Hiroshi to Yamauchi Hiroshi.

At the beginning, his grandfather Yamauchi Shikura named him “Yamuchi Hiroshi” in the hope that he could inherit the ancestral property of making flower cards and other gambling equipment.

Nowadays, the thinking of Hiroshi Yamauchi has changed a lot, and he has a strong desire for self-breakthrough in his heart.

In this way, Nintendo finally entered the field of video games and gradually transformed into a video game product production company, which basically echoed its ancestor product-flower cards for entertainment.

……

Listening to Yaskawa Hideaki’s introduction of Nintendo and Yamauchi, Tang Huan just smiled and nodded.

He certainly knows Yamauchi. This person is known in the industry for his sharp speech, toughness, and stubborn personality. He belongs to the traditional Japanese power leader. It was during the period when Yamauchi was in charge of the company that Nintendo was successfully transformed from a playing card manufacturer to an electronic player. Game companies.

In 1979, that is, this year, Nintendo began to design Game&Watch, a portable device concept from Yokoi Gunpei, and opened a subsidiary in New York Following the original historical trajectory, in 1980, Nintendo began to produce arcade machines. game.

Then, with the help of Yokoi Junpei, Shigeru Miyamoto developed “Donkey Kong” and achieved great success. It sold 65,000 copies and became the most popular game of the year.

In 1982, Nintendo launched the sequel to “Donkey Kong”-“Donkey Kong Jr.”, which is also a set of arcade games. Although it is not as good as Donkey Kong, it still sells well, with about 35,000 copies sold.

In the same year, Nintendo established an American branch in Redmond, Washington, and merged the New York branch.

At the same time, Nintendo has drawn on the success of Atari and other companies to target the cassette video game platform.

In July 1983, Nintendo launched the first generation of video game platform-FC game console, that is, red and white consoles.

But obviously, the FC game console has been cut off by Tang Huan’s Xiaobawang game console.

Tang Huan is naturally not tired of digging the footsteps of Japanese companies.

Besides, for him, game consoles, consumer electronic terminal products, are just an extension of technology applications. No matter how squeezed Nintendo and another famous manufacturer Sega, they will not affect this time-space reference coordinate system.

Furthermore, Nintendo’s own style is very tough. In comparison, the act of digging through walls is a friendly act.

Seeing Yaskawa Yingzhao spitting lotus flowers and chattering, Tang Huan suddenly flashed a thought, this person should be regarded as a leading party.