Riding the wind of rebirth

Hong Kong Island is not much restricted by the United States. Therefore, the Internet in Hong Kong Island is now far more advanced than that in the mainland. It has completed full-featured access and is developing in full swing.

The Internet on Hong Kong Island has actually passed the academic traction stage and has begun to enter the stage of exploration and growth.

This period actually refers to the gradual establishment of the general public's awareness and acceptance of the Internet and its steady growth.

During this period, the first batch of Internet companies will be established one after another and their business will be booming all the way. At the same time, they will also experience the test brought by the Internet bubble period, complete the successful exploration of Internet business models, and lay a solid foundation for the next rapid development period. Base.

Now Hong Kong Island has opened a 64K international dedicated line to access the Internet. The University of Hong Kong has also built its own 64K campus LAN, and many things can be exchanged through the network.

Although it can be said to be quite advanced, the researchers on Hong Kong Island seem to have not found the right direction for development.

Until now, the main application methods still stay in the stage of file retrieval and mail sending.

That is to say, the era of Internet portals where "content is king" has just emerged, and it is still far from the era of social networks where "relationships are king" and focus on users.

As someone who has experienced it, Zhou Zhi certainly knows the successful products and ideas left over from this process. Back then, he used spare resources to build a server in a state-owned unit, which included a full set of community forum functions, as well as some small games and a website called ICQ. Live chat tool.

At the beginning, this server was only used by my technical colleagues. It is very convenient to transfer small programs and small files to each other.

Later, I started to spread the novels and content picked up from the Internet in the forum, which immediately attracted the interest of many people.

As more and more people used it, this exchange forum soon became a popular small website in the intranet of state-owned enterprises.

Then discordant voices began to appear in the forum, and the business discussion area gradually evolved into a "tucao leadership area", and it was originally to use idle resources, but when there were too many users, it became a resource grabbing.

Finally, the leader ordered to shut down the server.

Although surfing was unsuccessful in his last life, Zhou Zhi is no stranger to how to build an application platform.

It's a pity that the source code of ICQ was picked up back then. Zhou Zhi is the maintainer, not the developer, so Zhou Zhi only understands the operating principle, functional modules, and general design ideas, and it is impossible to write down all the specific source code silently.

However, it doesn't seem too difficult to form a development team to get these out.

During this period of time, I have played a lot with computers, and Zhou Zhi’s coder attributes in his previous life are gradually awakening. The University of Hong Kong also has a Unicode-related research room, and the underlying protocol code is stored in the minicomputer in the research room.

However, many of the latest achievements require Li Leshan to fetch them from the server of the Yale University laboratory through the Internet.

Zhou Zhi brought a hard drive this time, which contained a series of large character library software, but it was a demonstration version of the simplest principle, but how to load it into the underlying protocol code was not covered before, so I had to write it now.

After preparing everything, Zhou Zhi and Li Leshan sat side by side in order to improve efficiency.

Zhou Zhi was in charge of writing the related procedures, while Li Leshan was on the sidelines reviewing.

Regarding some details and ideas, the two also need to discuss and introduce each other. After all, although the two have similar skills, they also have their own specialties. One is proficient in the protocol layer, and the other is proficient in the application layer.

Fortunately, both of them are experts, and the University of Hong Kong has its own researcher, an old professor with a large group of classmates, who is now dumbfounded to watch the two exchange a few words in extremely concise language, and then This kid from the mainland just clicked and tapped on the keyboard, and soon a program will be written and compiled successfully.

Of course, to complete the normal operation of a font, even if it is just a demo version, there is only one song "Climbing the Stork Tower" in the font, and the development part is only to create related programs, just like fixing the foundation and the buildings on it together The "foundation stone" of a program is not something that can be completed by a program, it has to be a "program package".

Fortunately, these programs are not large, and the two cooperated very tacitly because of their respective proficiency, and quickly completed the protocol related work of the demo version.

In fact, the work is almost done here, but for the convenience of demonstration, Zhouzhi still installed an input method.

The input method uses the Wubi input method invented by Wang Yongming. At the Los Angeles Olympic Games, a reporter from the famous French newspaper Agence France-Presse discovered that Chinese journalists had handwritten press releases and ridiculed it as news, claiming that there were 7000 people from all over the world at the Los Angeles Olympic Games. Many journalists, but only Chinese ones, are still reporting using medieval methods.

This is a tragic history. In addition to the serious derailment between the country's technological development and the world's advanced level, another important reason is the restrictions brought by pictographs.

In order to solve this problem, Chinese people have thought of many ways, such as the pinyin-based shorthand method, which was popular across the country for a while. The third sister once taught this method by herself, trying to use it to transcribe class notes.

In the era of typewriters, this was a dead end. Chinese character lead codes were not so easy to carry, and the machine itself was heavy. Unlike alphabetic languages, the keys could be directly fixed on the machine.

It was not until entering the computer age that there was a real opportunity to solve this problem.

Therefore, many people claim that the information age will bring about the demise of Chinese characters. That is either stupid or stupid. Many people do not understand typewriters, so they cannot see that computers can solve problems that typewriters cannot. Therefore, for Chinese character printing, computers are not only not Chinese characters. A sign of demise, on the contrary, is the dawn of a solution to this puzzle.

Of course, although the words are said in this way, countless hardships have also been experienced.

In actual operation, it was the inspiration and creativity of countless geniuses coupled with hard work that finally solved this problem.

After the invention of the Wangma Wubi input method, it was able to receive national strategic support and the recognition of the National Science and Technology Award, which is enough to illustrate its significance.

With the unicode protocol, the demo font library, and the input method, Chinese can be output on the computer.

The minicomputer of HKU is also UNIX system. There is no mouse and window interface, only a text input software operated by shortcut keys, which is also developed by HKU, called NEDIT.

But as long as it can be used, the text input interface without a mouse is extremely simple, and Zhou Zhi quickly typed out the ASCII code and "Climbing the Stork Tower" loaded in the font library on it.

The typed ASCII code is very strange. There is a horizontal line at the bottom of each character, indicating that these characters are not the ones in the previous UNIX system, but "new characters" taken from the new unicode font library.

"It's done! The feasibility has been verified!" Li Leshan slapped Zhou Zhi on the shoulder excitedly: "George, this is a moment that can be recorded in history! For the first time, we have loaded Chinese into the UNICODE font library!"

"If twenty words count..." Zhou Zhi felt calm.

"Of course it counts!" Li Leshan turned around and shouted to the watching crowd: "If you want to see a thousand miles away, go to a higher level! We finally climbed to this level, right?!"

"Yes—" The research room has become a sea of ​​celebration.