Riding the wind of rebirth

Having this protocol alone is not enough; to promote it widely, a very suitable application scenario is needed.

Embedding into a personal operating system is the best choice, which led to the creation of the Hanwen Large Font Library. With its excellent performance and flexible configuration that allows for hierarchical use, this font library can meet the needs of everyone from everyday home computers to professional book publishers, and has won the favor of Microsoft.

The next layer up is extended applications. This layer includes software and hardware upgrade packages for various professional equipment such as printers, color printers, typesetting systems, and communication equipment.

The hardware includes a font chip and a Chinese character card; the software includes an input method, editing software, a localization toolkit, and so on.

If Zhou Zhi hadn't taken a holistic approach to these issues related to Chinese character encoding from the very beginning, Mai Mingdong could have imagined that even with the superior performance of the Hanwen character library, it would have encountered numerous problems during its promotion. Each hurdle could have caused the Hanwen large character library to end up like many so-called "scientific research achievements," becoming something shelved and unused.

If things had gone according to the "normal" approach, Hanzi font library would probably still be in a difficult promotional phase and would never have become the only universally accepted font software in the world.

"The unified encoding for the Asian region has now been confirmed as UTF-8 encoding. The naming conference will be held in the capital next week, and the UNICODE organization will confirm and announce it to the public after the conference," said Mai Mingdong. "This is a huge contribution by China to the world's information industry, and it is also the most perfect and successful case of China integrating traditional characters into the information age at the information science level. Your contribution is great, and you can't be absent this time."

"They're deliberately making such a big show of themselves to challenge the Information Exchange Standards Committee, so I guess I won't go and cheer them on?" Zhou Zhi laughed.

"I've actually always had a question." Mai Mingdong thought for a moment, but decided to ask anyway: "When you were working on the Hanwen large font library, had you already planned out COS and MiniCOS, which were later developed based on the UNIX system?"

UTF is an abbreviation for Unicode Transformation Format.

The 8 represents eight bits, or four bytes, meaning that a Unicode character is represented by four bytes. Because UTF is a variable-length encoding, this 8 actually refers to the upper limit of the encoding rule in terms of bits. In reality, most Unicode characters do not require this many bytes.

Traditional information systems primarily use the 7-bit character set known as ASCII, which is the most well-known. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and it was designed by the American English Communications Institute.

Because it was designed for English, it has problems handling not only Chinese characters, but also several European languages ​​with tone marks.

In order to represent more characters, people came up with the idea of ​​check digits, using the highest bit as a character representation. This is the ASCII extended character set.

One extension uses characters with values ​​between 128 and 255 for drawing and line drawing, as well as some special European characters. Another extension uses characters with values ​​between 128 and 255 for special language characters in the Latin alphabet.

With the development of information technology in countries around the world, the limitations of this patchwork approach have been fully exposed.

As a product that emerged after the traditional typewriter, UTF-8 represents an advanced encoding technology for a new era of information technology, namely the network era and the wireless communication era.

Besides allowing for almost unlimited character counts, it also enables fast reading and writing via masking and shifting operations, and makes sorting easier.

However, UTF-8 is not without its problems. For example, some current systems, such as ISO 2022, 4873, 6429 and 8859, interpret the UTF-8 code value 100xxxxx, which has a usage rate of more than 50%, as a C1 control code, resulting in it being filtered or misinterpreted.

However, this problem is easily solved by modifying UTF-8 with a single byte, thus creating a modified UTF-8 code. As these systems are replaced by newer systems, this problem, like the impending Y2K problem, will cease to exist.

However, this problem does not exist in UNIX systems, as well as Linux, Clover OS, and MiniCOS systems developed based on UNIX, because UNIX systems were originally designed based on UNICODE.

As Clover's system gains traction in supercomputing systems, Java environment systems, and various server-terminal office systems, the unique advantages of its language environment are becoming increasingly apparent.

The system character compatibility issues that plague other developers simply don't exist with Clover, allowing everyone to focus their efforts on other research and development directions.

However, the reason why Mai Mingdong asked this question is that when Zhou Zhi was working on Hanwen Database, the impact of the UNICODE character set on the global information industry had not yet been fully realized. Even now, the ASCII character set is still the mainstream in Western society. The phenomenon of major software companies vying to be compatible with the UNICODE character set, which has only emerged in the last two or three years, is mainly due to the need to bundle operating systems with markets outside of English-speaking regions.

Without Zhou Zhi's subsequent guidance on Clover Group's research into development systems, Hanzi Library would at best be a product that adds icing on the cake for Windows and Apple OS. Unable to bypass others' intellectual property barriers, it could only rely on others to squeeze a little bit of profit out of them to satisfy its needs.

However, the result was that Clover, based on the open-source UNIX system, used the skills it had honed while developing VC modules for Microsoft to transform the character-based UNIX system into the graphical interface COS and MiniCOS. The first application was the Hanwen Chinese character card based on the MiniCOS instruction set. Not only did it make a fortune, it also fully satisfied the domestic tradition of "patching and mending for another three years" and realized the upgrade of the original information processing equipment in China.

This success has opened up a bright future for Clover's continued research and development of operating systems and industrial control general-purpose platform instruction sets.

Recently, while reviewing the development history of the Clover Group, Mak Ming-tung discovered a terrifying fact: along the way, Clover's technological accumulation and product development not only complemented each other, but also had a great deal of overlap in development paths and extremely precise development directions.

While other major companies, lacking sufficient control over their technological paths, had to aggressively pursue intellectual property rights, Clover, with its highly accurate vision, concentrated its efforts and quickly stood out from the competition, becoming a leader in its industry in the blink of an eye.

This is no longer walking on two legs alternately, it's practically running.

Such people are extremely rare, even on a global scale.

Zhou Zhi had already come up with a way to deflect the question: "At least so far, I'm considered one of the luckier ones."

After saying that, he patted Mai Xiaomiao's little hand: "The greatest luck, of course, is meeting Xiaomiao. If everything really is planned, then my meeting with Xiaomiao must also be part of the plan, right?"

Mai Mingdong was indeed delighted. Indeed, if it weren't for Mai Xiaomiao's return to China, Zhou Zhi's business would most likely have stopped at the MiniCos general platform and storage chips. Clover COS would not have evolved into the basic operating platform of nonlinear supercomputing matrix, and storage chips would not have evolved into computing power cards.

Even with the technical accumulation of MiniCOS, industrial control chips, graph database engines, and several "learning mode" engineering software in the early stages, it would have been impossible for Clover to achieve its current level of success and scale in the short term.

The problem is that at that stage, all of Zhouzhi's efforts seemed to be aimed at the emergence of Mai Xiaomiao.

It was as if he knew such a person would arrive, putting on a show of "everything was ready, and the east wind just happened to blow." (End of Chapter)