The Ming Dynasty did not revolutionize

Chapter 403 Ming-style Computer Kernel
Zhu Jianxuan came to the dedicated computer room in the Academy of Sciences, sat in front of the latest computer, and observed and fiddled with the keyboard and mouse.

This mouse looks very familiar. It is a rectangular block with a front and a back, and two buttons and a wire on the front.

At first glance, it is highly similar to the large mouse that Zhu Jianxuan used in his previous life, except that it does not have a scroll wheel in the middle.

But the more important difference is actually the internal structure. Ming Dynasty did not have the laser mouse that has become popular in the new century, so this mouse has a mechanical structure.

There is a ball inside the mouse with a small cross section exposed at the bottom. When you move the mouse, the ball rubs against the desktop and rolls, and the cursor on the desktop also moves synchronously.

It is far less sensitive than a laser mouse and has certain requirements for the operating surface. It is best to use it on a special mouse pad.

The keyboard next to it also looks familiar to Zhu Jianxuan at first glance. The overall size is closer to the standard keyboard in his previous life, and the total number of keys is probably more than a hundred.

But if you look closely, you will find that this thing is more different from the keyboard of the previous life than the mouse.

All the keys of this keyboard are marked with Chinese characters and are basically evenly divided into four areas, with the number of keys in each area being basically the same.

If you look closely, you can see that the characters above are obviously not chosen randomly, and most of them have special meanings.

There are numbers and addition and subtraction for calculation, as well as logical analysis words such as and, or, and not.

There are also some buttons whose uses and meanings cannot be seen at a glance, such as take, discard, use, show, name, Tao, Yuan, instrument, technique, order, etc.

There are also yin and yang, the five elements of gold, wood, water, fire and earth, and the ten heavenly stems that begin with Jia, Yi, Bing and Ding. These look like things on a compass.

If other irrelevant modern people look at a keyboard, they will probably subconsciously think that this thing should be used for some feudal and superstitious gadget.

But these things are actually purely scientific, and were created by the top craftsmen of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Jianxuan reminded them that they could make something similar to a keyboard, but he did not ask them how to arrange the keys specifically, as he did not want to bring the English keyboard from his previous life over.

Zhu Jianxuan wanted to see what kind of keyboard the craftsmen, who basically only had an Eastern cultural background, would make.

This is the result that Zhu Jianxuan is seeing now.

This result surprised Zhu Jianxuan at the time, because there was really not a single letter on it.

The craftsmen of the Ming Dynasty, as well as the craftsmen of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Engineering, would use Latin letters to complete formula calculations in their daily literal learning and calculations.

This keyboard, on the other hand, does not have this feature at all. This was not Zhu Jianxuan's request, nor was it based on any cultural considerations on the part of the craftsmen.

Purely from an engineering perspective, the Latin alphabet does not fit in with their design logic.

If Zhu Jianxuan had never come into contact with this machine, he would have no idea what these buttons meant, and naturally would not know how to use this strange keyboard.

However, computers are Zhu Jianxuan's main focus, and he roughly knows how these things are made.

For those keys with clear meanings, each key corresponds to a fixed command, and the name of the command is also the name of the key.

As for the Yin and Yang keys, they can be used to directly input binary numbers in the direct control machine mode, or to indicate data status in the program editing mode.

The five elements of gold, wood, water, fire and earth are mainly combined with 0 and the numbers from 1 to ten to complete the direct input of hexadecimal numbers.

Because Chinese characters contain a lot of information, one Chinese character can roughly reflect the true meaning of a command.

For example, addition, subtraction, display, name, command, etc., you can know the general meaning at a glance. The key is to be able to directly correspond the actual commands with the key names.

However, the amount of information contained in a single letter is too small, and the letter itself has no clear meaning, so this cannot be done.

If Latin letters are marked on the key surface, a separate table should be prepared to indicate what command each Latin letter corresponds to.

If you use letters to name the keys and then use English-like alphabetic characters to represent commands, the efficiency will be very low.

Taking English as an example, "加" is "addition". Even if it is omitted, you have to at least write "add". The English keyboard requires a combination of three keys to form this command.

The craftsmen of the Ming Dynasty simply wrote the word "add" on a key, and pressing the key would directly generate the "add" command, which made the operation and response speed faster.

Before it is fully electronic, new characters can be created at any time.

You can add strokes and radicals to existing Chinese characters to form Chinese characters with similar but different meanings, which can be used directly to distinguish similar commands with different purposes.

Most functions have separate shortcut keys, which are of course much faster than typing commands manually.

In the early days of computers, the number of commands required was very limited; one hundred was a very large number, and a keyboard with more than one hundred keys could indeed be fully deployed.

But if we add twenty-six more letters, or even more than fifty letters to distinguish the big messages, the space taken up will be too large.

It’s not that Chinese characters cannot be used to represent formulas and symbols, it’s just that they are more tiring to the eyes on paper.

But it doesn’t matter inside the machine. You just need to specify a group of Chinese characters as special symbols to express various formulas.

Therefore, the thing in front of Zhu Jianxuan cannot be considered a typical computer keyboard in the concept of his previous life.

It's more like a large number of function buttons concentrated together.

For ordinary people, this thing cannot input complete articles now, and can only input the words on the keys, which are the command words used to control the computer.

Unless you only use the more than 100 Chinese characters on the keyboard to write articles.

The craftsmen in the computer laboratory are writing articles using these more than one hundred Chinese characters.

It looks like classical Chinese has been refined again, discarding all the redundant elements and only using a few key characters.

At first glance, it all looks like this:
"Take the yuan, name it Jia, make it 0, add ten, add ten, and show it."

It means adding 0 to a number 10, adding it 10 times cumulatively, and finally outputting the result.

To the craftsmen, this was actually a calculated arrangement.

But in Zhu Jianxuan's view, this thing is highly similar to the assembly language of the previous life, the lowest-level computer programming language besides machine code.

If you replace the individual commands in the assembly language with a single Chinese character, it will be very close to what you see.

If you write it according to the format of the craftsmen, it will be even more similar.

Therefore, what the Ming Dynasty craftsmen wrote was actually a computer programming language developed in the Ming Dynasty.

The level has also reached the level of assembly language.

It still looks like Chinese characters, but actually it is not Chinese.

Certainly not English, Latin, or any other human language.

Because programming, programs, computer codes, and the various symbols displayed in these industries are not languages ​​in the sociological sense.

When they write these things, they don't describe ideas like writing articles. Instead, they combine functions, symbols, numbers and other elements according to clear logical relationships to directly construct a "computational plan".

The meaning of each letter and each symbol is highly specialized and is clearly specified by the program algorithm itself.

In theory, there is no need to interpret the meaning of the various symbols in human language.

The English words in the code may have nothing to do with the actual functions. If you are too lazy to name them, you can just use numbers to represent them.

However, in this case, the command function must be determined by the instruction document, and the operator must memorize the specific function of a certain number.

Of course, it would be very uncomfortable to operate in that way, so people would instinctively bind these functions to words with similar meanings.

As for whether it is bound to a specific English word or to a specific Chinese character, there is no essential logical difference.

A computer is essentially a field of light bulbs, and the only way to represent information is by turning each bulb on or off.

Therefore, for computers, the information they can recognize and receive is never the addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, loop, and output that humans talk about.

It is not add, mov, or, not in programming languages.

Instead, it is a set of switch commands arranged in a regular pattern, which is actually something like "on on on on switch off off on", corresponding to whether to turn on or off your specific light bulb.

Computer operators have to match what humans want to do with these switch sequences.

The reason why Zhu Jianxuan programmed in his previous life was in English was simply because the earliest programmers spoke English in their daily lives.

They simplified addition to add, mapped add to a set of switch instructions, and then wrote this correspondence into the machine.

Then they can use add to control the machine to do addition.

At the same time, they also have to correspond the binary signals of the two keys on the keyboard to the letters a and d.

Tell the machine to press those two keys, and you will enter the letters a and d.

They do this simply because they use English in their daily lives.

In later generations, Chinese character programming was not taken seriously, there were no professional personnel to develop and maintain it, and it was not widely used.

It’s not because Chinese programming is inefficient, nor is it because English programming is inefficient.

The fundamental reason is that English symbols took precedence.

By the time Chinese users came into contact with computers, the programming language system using English symbols had already been highly mature, and there was no need to create a separate system from scratch.

Continuing to use English symbols will make multinational cooperation more convenient.

This is actually similar to the fact that the width of a horse's butt determines the width of the carriage, which in turn determines the standard width of the train track.

A successful first mover uses a specific standard that has no meaning. Successors will not take the initiative to change this standard that does not affect the function unless there is a huge conflict of interest.

Essentially, programmers don't need to reinvent the wheel.

The craftsmen around Zhu Jianxuan usually speak and write in Chinese characters, so naturally they would not go to the trouble of learning Latin programming.

They now write Chinese characters such as addition and subtraction directly on the keyboard.

It is still a single-button direct command mode, and now it runs more efficiently than Latin or English assembly.

If you use the keyboard of the previous life to do this, it will not have such good effect.

Because at that time, typical keyboards were in English, and the underlying codes of the entire computer industry were all written in English.

Not only do we need to design a special Chinese keyboard, but we also need to build a Chinese character computer hardware and software system from scratch in accordance with the logic of the Ming Dynasty craftsmen.

Zhu Jianxuan is quite satisfied with the current computer system of Ming Dynasty.

However, programming languages ​​will become more and more complex in the future, and we must consider object-oriented things as well as various names and comments in the code.

Just over a hundred commands and symbols are definitely not enough.

The key point is that after having a computer, we must consider using it to process and display text, and to use it for typesetting and printing.

There are thousands of commonly used Chinese characters, and there are at least tens of thousands of Chinese characters in total. The method of one key corresponding to one character is obviously not suitable for typing.

Therefore, this thing with a large number of buttons concentrated together still needs to evolve and upgrade into the universal computer keyboard of the previous life.

However, the upgrade itself is not difficult. All you need to do is design an input method for it.

Just copy the typical input method logic from the previous life.

When copying the Wubi input method, just designate about thirty keys to be used specifically for combination coding and typing.

When using the Pinyin input method, you can also directly use the double pinyin and Zhuyin modes.

Because it is a purely Chinese environment, each vowel will be regarded as a character and directly correspond to a designated key, rather than being regarded as a combination of several letters.

For the people of the Ming Dynasty, their pinyin input method was to use two fixed keys to produce one word.

The key is to continue to develop the semiconductor industry and provide memory with high enough capacity and speed to store commonly used Chinese character databases.

Zhu Jianxuan fiddled with the "supercomputer heart" in front of him for a while, thinking about future plans, and decided to write a rough plan himself after returning.

To write out the character combination logic of the Wubi input method, if there is no ready-made experience, it may take several years for the craftsmen to figure it out on their own.

After making a note of this incident, Zhu Jianxuan went to the medical laboratory again to inquire about the situation of the new antibiotic industry.

Allicin is the simplest and most brutal antibiotic. Although it has a very wide range of applications and is not difficult to produce, its biggest problem is that it is not resistant to storage and has a strong smell.

In the past, allicin was mostly used as veterinary medicine. It was mixed into various feeds and fed to livestock to prevent various diseases and pests in advance.

Truly mature antibiotics still need to be the antibiotics used in modern medicine such as penicillin, sulfonamides, erythromycin, and cephalosporins.

However, these modern antibiotics are difficult to produce, and in the past they only gradually matured during and after World War II.

Starting from the coal chemical and petrochemical industries, Zhu Jianxuan guided the development of the organic chemical industry in the Ming Dynasty and gradually completed the corresponding scientific research foundation.

Zhu Jianxuan assigned relevant scientific research tasks to the Academy of Sciences ten years ago, and later achieved good results, isolating several of the most important modern antibiotics.

In the past two years, we have been working hard to get these products out of the laboratory and complete the industrial production process.

Based on these antibiotics, we will then develop more effective antibiotics of different types and continue to look for more types of synthetic drugs.

(End of this chapter)