Siheyuan: The Era of Core Generation

Chapter 206 The First Apple Computer

"Zhao Ye, you have to have confidence in the country, in yourself, and more importantly, in our D." When Zhao Ye couldn't make up his mind and came to discuss with Secretary Yin, Secretary Yin said this to Zhao Ye. The remarks.

Zhao Ye, who had been thinking for a long time, still didn't dare to take too many risks. The display factory in Zhennan is too important to allow any mistakes.But since it can't be moved here as a whole, it is still possible to build a display production workshop in the new factory.

The equipment and personnel were imported from Zhennan, and with the help of some local workers, a display production workshop was soon formed.

Although Zhennan has been affected to a certain extent, this sacrifice is worth it. If it goes well, the production capacity here will soon be able to make up for the loss of Zhennan.

Monitors, motherboards, memory, these three things Zhao Ye plans to produce in the new factory.

Zhennan is mainly responsible for processors, while Jingcheng United Factory is responsible for the manufacture of keyboards, mice, and display chips.

After much deliberation, Zhao Ye realized that a hard disk was still missing to be perfect, but he did not add this device in the end. He just added a large floppy disk drive to the peripherals of this small computer, increasing his storage space to 3MB.

The hard disk has been used as early as two years ago, and now in Zhennan's laboratory, there is already a fixed hard disk with a capacity of 5GB.It's just that the current hard disk is still very fragile, and the damage rate is extremely high.If you want to increase the internal protection mechanism, you have to face the dilemma of either increasing the volume or reducing the capacity.

Zhao Ye's idea is that neither will work.In addition to military models that don’t need to worry too much about capacity in order to improve security and stability, commercial models also require researchers to expand the data capacity as much as possible within a limited physical volume. In addition, not only increase the reading speed, It is also necessary to improve the stability of the hard disk, so that it cannot be damaged by a slight vibration.If these problems are not resolved, he will not release this thing.

For Zhao Ye, the processor, memory, and storage are his biggest technical barriers.Other aspects can even be handed over to other factories for OEM in the future, and these three things must be firmly grasped.

For the personal computer to be launched this time, the focus is actually on the design.As for the production technology, to be honest, they are all mature technologies in the past few years.Not to mention that there are a large number of mature skilled workers in Beijing and Zhennan, which is actually very beneficial to the team building of the new factory.

At least in the workshop of the new factory, Zhao Ye can calmly arrange for new workers to adapt to this working mode as quickly as possible.This is the case with factories, especially newly established factories, there is no fixed mode of operation for everything.This time is also the most difficult time to manage and control.

Fortunately, there are old workers from Zhennan and the joint factory, who can quickly drive the rhythm of the entire new factory, bring good atmosphere and rules into the new factory, and let it form a fighting force as soon as possible.In addition, at this time, the products produced are all the things these veteran workers are most familiar with, which further increases the authority of the veteran workers.

Of course, as the director of a large factory, Zhao Ye's front-line management work is not his job.Even the operation of the entire production department is in charge of the deputy factory director in charge of production, and the management of the factory is basically presided over by Secretary Yin.

Zhao Ye's task is more about grasping the general direction and developing technology. In Secretary Yin's words, Zhao Ye is the helmsman who decides where to sail the ship and how to sail the ship. He doesn't need to worry about it.

Zhao Ye was also not polite, and the management of specific things was not his strong point, so he simply pushed it to Secretary Yin.

Today, Zhao Ye came to a small building in the factory early in the morning. It is said to be a small building here, but that is also compared to the taller buildings around it.In this small three-story building, more than 300 software engineers gathered at this time.Now they are divided into two groups, one group has more than 40 people, and is responsible for modifying a version of the operating system suitable for the current computer based on the original operating system.

The other group of people will be much larger, and their task is to develop the office software proposed by Zhao Ye.This large group is divided into several groups to develop different modules and functions.

The main purpose of Zhao Ye's visit today is to inspect the work progress here.Zhao Ye had already announced to everyone the timetable for the launch of their personal computers. Regarding this timetable, various factories are busy arranging production.In this regard, a slightly experienced factory manager can deduce the approximate progress from the specific work arrangement.

It can be said that in this regard, Zhao Ye is not worried at all.What worries him the most is the software aspect.Before, Zhao Ye thought it was just a software, how difficult could it be?However, it wasn't until recently that he shifted his mind from the factory's hardware production to the software that he discovered the problem.

For today's programmers, the current development environment is not what those programmers of later generations can imagine.After all, so far, they don't even have a mature development tool.It is really difficult for these people to develop such functional software in a pure assembly language-like way.

Therefore, after Zhao Ye discovered the problem, he immediately pushed the hardware production to Secretary Yin, and directly transferred to the software development department to "work".

"Today, everyone is called here, and there is only one task assigned to everyone, and that is to develop a new tool software for software development."

Zhao Ye's words made everyone present stunned. Why did these words sound so awkward!

"Director, I don't understand what you mean. What does it mean to develop a software for software development?" A team leader asked Zhao Ye curiously. After he asked this sentence, many programmers couldn't help but nodding.

"It's very simple. We directly use computer language to write such functional software. The efficiency is too low. Not only does it greatly increase the workload, but frequent manipulation of pointers and transfer of instruction sets is also very error-prone. Don't bring up the mistake, it's hard to find where the source of the mistake is."

"Yeah, factory manager, there are only a few instruction sets. When errors are reported, they are nothing more than feedback. We spend the most time debugging programs and finding errors."

"Yeah, I also discovered this problem, so we need to develop a special language and tools for programming. That is, a software for writing software. This software must have a more visual language logic. Use this language, after writing the corresponding program, it also has the function of debugging the program. During debugging, this tool software must be able to point out the unpassable statement at any time and give specific instructions. In this way, our efficiency can be Lift it up."

"But, factory manager, how can we make such a program run on our computer?"

"It's simple. After the program is completed, just translate the code written in this language into machine code. For example, if you don't know English, but you have to read English materials, Writing articles in English, what do you guys do at this time?"

"Find a translator! Translate the English you want to read into Chinese, and then translate the articles written in Chinese into English."

"Yes, the work we have to do is to create such a translation to improve our efficiency." Zhao Ye said firmly and without doubt.

Zhao Ye is the director of the factory, and others can only unconditionally cooperate with what he decides.Soon a group of more than ten people was formed, and this time, Zhao Ye served as the group leader himself.

If you want to develop such a tool software, you must first invent a "high-level language".For example, the C language in Zhao Ye's previous life, or software languages ​​and logic mechanisms such as C++, Java, etc.With this foundation, a new software development model can be formed by integrating some commonly used functions in software development.

Zhao Ye has ready-made materials for reference, but at this time, Zhao Ye's computer is not as powerful as the later generations.So correspondingly, the current software also does not have such powerful and complicated content.The first step Zhao Ye has to do is to transform the things borrowed by later generations into time and space.

This is a very difficult process, which is difficult because of the logical rigor of the computer language and the differences in the new computer processors and operating mechanisms.

Different hardware, of course, needs to correspond to different software, and different software, of course, needs to use different languages.Therefore, if Zhao Ye wanted to copy the homework this time, it would not work.In his data space, he first builds the physical model of the computer he wants to produce, and then builds his high-level language logic bit by bit on this basis.

This work took Zhao Ye a lot of time, and the people in the same team were not idle. They wanted to build a simulation machine on the workstation computer they used.That is to use the computing power of the computer on the workstation to virtualize the hardware logic environment of a personal computer.Only in this way, their tools have a basis for operation.It is impossible to let such a program run on the workstation, and it has to be transferred to the personal computer during the test, so that the meaning of this software will be lost, and it will not be able to perform breakpoint debugging as before.

Before they knew it, the time came to the Spring Festival of [-]. On this day, Zhao Ye and the entire project team did not leave the software building of the factory.Today, more programmers are gathered here, and they are all doing intense and orderly debugging work.The production of the hardware is already on track, and a lot of inventory has been shipped to the United States, and it is now being assembled at the Apple factory in Los Angeles.

Everyone is waiting for the software team to deliver qualified results, otherwise a personal computer without software cannot be placed in the sales cabinet anyway.

(End of this chapter)