Traveling through the sword to engage in military industry.

The year 1955 in the world of Bright Sword was the first year of what was later called the technological craze.

In this year, Todai accomplished two major things.

The first thing was naturally the nuclear submarine's global voyage at the beginning of the year, which directly detonated the true nuclear age.

Another thing is the launch of the 10 chip in October, which is considered the first year of the IT boom.

Microcomputer 8080 CPU
After this chip came out, professional terms such as CPU began to become really popular in the IT industry. This small chip, whose performance was comparable to that of a large transistor computer at the time, and the first DRAM product produced in conjunction with it - the first generation of 4KB DRAM, became the brain of the first generation of programmable switches!
A control board integrating 8080 and 32KB DRAM, after several months of hard work by Liangjian World engineers, finally became the core of the first generation of 1000-port program-controlled switching system. The new generation of program-controlled switching system, code-named G, has been field tested and fully realized the functions of a telephone switch.

Although the vertical and horizontal switches of this era have long achieved a capacity of 1000 ports, and the largest even achieved a capacity of 10000 ports, from the current stage, it seems that there is not much difference from the program-controlled switches. However, the number of racks of the program-controlled switches is only 1/10 of that of the vertical and horizontal switches, and the weight of each rack is reduced by more than half, which is very convenient for installation and maintenance. It uses pre-programmed programs to control the connection of the switch, and its advantages are very obvious: fast connection speed, multiple functions, high efficiency, clear sound, reliable quality, and its capacity can be as large as ports.

The biggest advantage of these advantages is that the cost of the switch is greatly reduced! The telephone system built by Zongheng Switch costs about 1000 US dollars per imported equipment, which means that the cost of opening a user is as high as 1000 US dollars, plus the amortization of lines and other equipment. In the previous telephone system, it cost at least 5000 yuan for an ordinary user to install a phone!
Under Ren Zhong's leadership, Dongda University developed its own vertical and horizontal switches, which reduced the price of installation by two-thirds. When it reached the hands of the public, it still had to pay an initial installation fee of up to 2000 yuan.

For ordinary people whose salaries are generally only a few dozen to a hundred yuan, a telephone is obviously a very expensive luxury item at this price.

Now that we have broken through the new technology, in theory, the additional cost of a 10,000-port programmable switching system is not a multiple relationship with that of a 1,000-port programmable switching system, but a weak linear relationship. If the output can reach a scale of tens of millions of lines, there will be no problem in reducing the per capita installation cost after amortization to less than 1,000 yuan in the short term.

This is equivalent to lowering the threshold for making phone calls by half!
Such technological progress will accelerate the reduction of installation costs per household. While mainstream foreign switches cost 500 to 600 US dollars per line to install, our costs have basically been reduced to less than half of theirs.

The most important thing is that compared to Zonghengzhi, which has no intellectual property rights for underlying technology, the core technology parts of our current set of programmable switching systems are basically our own patents!
At the same time, in the production and manufacturing of CPUs, we have also accumulated a large number of patents for manufacturing equipment and CPU design. Frankly speaking, we have registered corresponding patents for the CPU underlying architecture and instructions. Not only X86, but also the underlying CPU design in RISC, represented by the 6800 chip, have now applied for most of the basic patents.

It covers both complex instruction set and reduced instruction set CPU systems!
In this way, after completing the intellectual property layout and industrialization layout, the new telephone switch field and the broader IT field will become our world.

Beijing.

Wang Jianan, technical director of Sihai Computer Company, was extremely excited.

"Director Wang, what are you so happy about?" A company employee nearby looked at Wang Jianan and asked curiously.

"Today is a new milestone in the development history of our company and even our Dongda Computer." Wang Jianan did not keep everyone in suspense and spoke directly, "We just held a meeting of our 8080 computer companies in Beijing. The president of Liming Research Institute personally announced that our first generation of microcomputer CPU chip has officially come out. Next, our computer companies in Beijing will receive microcomputer reference designs from the Computer Research Center of Liming Research Institute. In the future, we will fully switch from transistor computers to new computers based on new integrated circuit CPUs."

"Since most functions are realized on chips, the computer design of the future will become very compact. A computer with a computing speed of about 30 times can be accommodated in a size as small as a carry-on suitcase."

"And this kind of computer is cheaper than the previous transistor computer, which means that from now on, we will enter a whole new era of computers!"

Wang Jianan briefly explained the matter in a few words.

This was the first meeting after the advent of 8080 that Ren Zhong began to personally promote the use of 8080. Next, engineers from the Computer Research Center will go to more cities to hold promotional meetings. Since the advent of transistor computers, taking into account the customized computer needs of different industries in various places, more than a dozen computer companies have been established in basically every province and region in the country, which facilitates full market competition and healthy market development.

On the other hand, Ren Zhong is also cultivating the scale of practitioners in the entire market.

Although the hardware of transistor computers was very different from the later new computers based on integrated circuit CPUs, Ren Zhong still tried his best to follow the subsequent development trends in terms of operating systems and programming languages, and guide the computer industry's software and hardware to develop in the mainstream direction of the future.

For example, high-level programming languages ​​​​first introduced FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal, and C, but the underlying layer is still assembly language.

These technologies were also used when Ren Zhong introduced the mainstream computers of the main world into the domestic products of the fifth district, except that the transistor computers were used openly, while the latter were used secretly and not disclosed at all.

"Director Wang, what is a microcomputer?" a colleague asked curiously.

"This is a new concept. It's normal that you don't know about it. According to President Ren, in the future our computers will become compact, highly integrated, cheap and powerful. Compared with transistor computers, microcomputers with the same functions may only occupy a dozen times less space. In short, if a transistor computer is the size of a piano, a microcomputer will be at most the size of a drawer. In addition, the input, output and display will be connected, and eventually it will be convenient enough for ordinary people to use."

Wang Jianan still has some yearning when talking about these things. In fact, the use scenario of microcomputers described by Ren Zhong is more sci-fi than this. In the future, almost every family will have one or even several computers, and people's work and entertainment will be realized through computers. Computers can be used for office work, scientific research, and entertainment and watching movies.
Wang Jianan felt that many of the things Ren Zhong said were too sci-fi and unimaginable, and it was even more inappropriate to publicize them to his colleagues now.

"Hiss, how is this possible?" A colleague gasped, "Computers are so complicated, how can ordinary people use it?" In his mind, those who can use computers are now high-tech talents. Even though Ren Zhong has given priority to the training of talents in the electronics and computer industries, the number of students admitted each year is increasing, and the academic performance requirement is for those excellent graduates with the best math skills.

Anyway, there is a college entrance examination now, but when it comes to studying majors, no one has the right to choose their own majors. In view of the extreme shortage of talent, universities recruit students and arrange majors based on their scores in various subjects.

Although this will dampen the interest of some people, in this new era of nascent development, it is necessary to deploy the best talents to the most urgent places as much as possible.

Majors such as nuclear energy and aerospace have transferred the best and most outstanding talents; majors such as electronics, computers, materials, metallurgy, and machinery have taken the next best students for training to enrich a large number of factories and research institutes.

Electronics and Computer Science have the highest requirements for math scores, so students with good math scores will be given priority by teachers of these two majors.

Therefore, this group of technical talents at Sihai Computer Company are already the best graduates in recent years.

But even so, they still find it difficult to use computers. If ordinary people were given a transistor computer, it is estimated that after turning on the power, the most they would do is press the power button to shut down the computer!
Today's transistor computers not only have command-line interfaces for human-computer interaction, but also have rather primitive input and output devices. From magnetic drum cores to disk and tape storage, the threshold for using transistor computers almost requires professional university graduates to learn.

"Dean Ren has said that in the future, the speed of computer development will double every year and a half. Ordinary people cannot use our computers now, but after two or three generations of computers, the human-computer interaction mode will become very simple. People can use computer programs with an input tool called a "mouse" without having to enter any command lines! Dean Ren has said that the Computer Research Center will soon design an input device that can simplify computer operations to replace cumbersome keyboard commands. Computer functions can be used by moving and clicking."

Wang Jianan's words surprised his colleagues around him, and it seemed like a new door was opened for them.

I still don’t understand it, but I think it’s pretty cool.

"Old Wang, come here and tell me in detail what is going on at the Computer Research Center of the Liming Research Institute?" Ma Haoxiang, the company's general manager, came over and said to Wang Jianan.

Ren Zhong convened the first 8080 promotion conference, and in addition to the technical director of a Beijing computer company, the top technical leaders of public institutions across Beijing and computer managers from research institutes and universities were also invited.

"Okay, Mr. Ma," Wang Jianan said, and then said to his colleagues, "I'll talk to you about this topic when I come back."

As the end of the domestic industrial chain, Sihai Computer Company previously purchased various transistor computer accessories to assemble customized computers for target customers, including customized hardware and customized software applications.

Upstream of them are various transistor computer component manufacturers and the Dawn Research Institute Computer Research Center.

The Dawn Computer Research Center does not sell products directly, but instead makes reference designs for various computers and provides basic things such as underlying operating systems and high-level language compiler environments.

"Lao Wang, has the higher-ups decided to transform and develop the computer industry? How many more years can we continue to develop transistor computers?" Ma Haoxiang asked straight to the point.

"Mr. Ma, according to President Ren, we at Dongda will no longer develop transistor computers. The factories will only supply replacements for old models. In the future, large-scale production of accessories will mostly focus on the manufacturing of integrated circuit CPUs. They will provide motherboard-level computer core components. We have already obtained the reference implementation schematics of the entire computer. We can freely configure input and output accessories on the upstream motherboard to create a complete new computer." Wang Jianan replied.

"The new computer is much smaller than the original transistor computer. If we use this kind of microcomputer for factory automation process control, it will be very easy to integrate it with the production line. Compared with the current transistor computer, both the power consumption and the size are reduced by an order of magnitude. In the food automation production line application that Sihai Computer is best at, we expect to reduce the cost by more than half by using the new computer!"

"Hiss, the cost of the new computer has been reduced so much." Ma Haoxiang took a breath of cold air, "In this way, perhaps many small and medium-sized food factories can afford the cost of customizing computers when renovating their production lines. Wouldn't our market in this area expand a lot at once?"

"Yes, Mr. Ma, according to what President Ren explained, the new computer is more modular and has lower costs. After the hardware is finalized, we don't need to modify anything later. We just need to work hard on production line access and application development. The new computer will have a unified operating system, unified development language and unified compilation environment. In the future, technicians working in computers will not be required to learn more than in the transistor computer era.

New computers will have fewer components and will be more reliable.”

"Then our company's main technical personnel, as long as they do not need to perform on-site project operation and maintenance, should all transform and start learning the use of new computers and application development. In addition, we should recruit more employees to reserve talents in case our business volume increases significantly and we do not have a qualified talent pool to take over." Ma Haoxiang's eyes lit up when he heard what Wang Jianan said. As the soul of a company, Wang Jianan is undoubtedly the soul figure in terms of technology.

The person who is pushing this now is the reputable Dean Ren. No one doubts what he says because every boast that Dean Ren has made over the past decade has come true! (End of this chapter)