The place where Li Xuan met Hermann Hauser was in the office of Akon Company. Unlike Currie, who was slightly fat, Hauser was a personable English gentleman who was very enthusiastic about taking Li Xuan on a tour of his company.

In fact, there is nothing to visit in Aikang, just a few offices. Aikang's computer production is outsourced to cooperative factories, and the real core of the company is more than a dozen R&D personnel. In Hauzer's general manager's office, there is a row of display cabinets against the wall, which displays all the signal computers developed by Aikang since its establishment.

"The first computer we developed in our company was called System1, and this is the first prototype I made myself!" Hauzer said with a smile, pointing to a small and delicate computer in the window, his tone full of pride.

Well, small and delicate is just Li Xuan's beautiful words, this is actually a simple 8-bit microcomputer. The whole machine is composed of two bare boards, one board includes the LED display, keyboard and tape interface, and the other board includes the CPU and other computer components.

It's not pretty, but it's cheap, and when it went public early last year, Akon set the price of £65 for bulk parts and £75 for assembled finished products. Relying on the low price, as soon as this system1 was unveiled, it was sought after by many amateur computer enthusiasts, allowing Aikang to grab the first pot of gold.

Probably the first company in the UK to implement an intranet of computers, Andy Hopper immediately set about building a dedicated LAN for the company, named ECO.

Hopper is a very interesting person, and while Li Xuan was having a pleasant conversation with Hauser, he walked in wearing a Royal Air Force flight suit from World War II. He is an avid flyer and has just returned to the company after taking a pilot training course in a propeller aircraft.

Hopper's conversation was very funny, and he personally demonstrated the various functions of the ECO network he designed for Aikang for Li Xuan. The company's intranet undoubtedly makes the communication between R&D personnel more convenient and can effectively improve work efficiency.

Li Xuan and Hopper exchanged many topics about local area networks, such as two very popular non-public network standards in the industry, Token Ring and ARC, such as the famous Ethernet technology.

"The reason why I came to invent the Cambridgering network system when I was a PhD student was actually influenced by Mr. Metcalfe. His paper "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching Technology for Local Area Computer Networks" published in '76 gave me a lot of inspiration!

"Do you know why Hauzer poached me to Aikang?"

Hopper pointed to his friend and asked Li Xuan. Li Xuan shook his head cooperatively.

"At first, I thought he was taking a fancy to my skills and was very happy to come to work at Aikang. Unexpectedly, after he recruited me to the company, he asked me to be a sales manager!"

Hopper deliberately looked at Hauser with disdainful eyes, "The first thing this guy asked me to do was to go to the computer lab in Cambridge and sell System1 to my mentor and colleagues!

Li Xuan had a very pleasant communication with the two.

Elkan is a very young and dynamic company, and the eldest of the company's three shareholders, Hauzer, is only thirty-two years old, and Currie and Hopper are both only twenty-seven. The majority of the company's employees, including the three shareholders, are alumni of the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Aikan, Hopper was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge.

After Curry's attitude began to soften, Dongfang Electronics' acquisition of Aikang was officially launched. Li Xuan specially invited Standard Chartered Bank as the financial advisor for the merger and acquisition. After several rounds of verbal negotiations between the two sides, Dongfang Electronics finally bagged the computer company, which had just been established for a year and a half, with a price of 2.15 million pounds.

The first thing Dongfang Electronics did after completing the acquisition was naturally to appease its employees. Fortunately, the scale of Aikang is not large, even if Corporal Li Xuan Lixian personally had a deep conversation with every employee, it would not take much time. Coupled with the policy of a 10% salary increase, the people's hearts that were originally floating within Aikang quickly stabilized.

Among all the R&D engineers, Li Xuan undoubtedly pays the most attention to Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson. These two are the real designers of the ARM architecture, but now they are being preempted by Li Xuan. Naturally, he wanted to convince these two bulls to rejoin the development of Dongfang Electronics' ERM architecture.

Sophie Wilson is a somewhat special lady, well, she's actually transgender. Li Xuan also worked hard to speed up the research and development of the ERM architecture, although there was a trace of strangeness in his heart, but he looked like nothing happened, and communicated with each other amiably.

The new company needs to have a new atmosphere, and after being acquired by Dongfang Electronics, Aikang is not going to continue to squeeze into the two-story attic of the store pù along the street, but will look for a new office address in Cambridge Town. The new company will focus on the research and development of personal computers, and at the same time, Dongfang Electronics will set up a technology research and development center in Cambridge Town to focus on research and development in the fields of ERM architecture and LAN technology.

The Atom computer will continue to be on sale, and Akon will develop a new personal computer based on the Atom. Because Dongfang Electronics' ERM architecture directly skips 16 bits, it is a 32-bit instruction set architecture.

After the ERM development is mature, Dongfang Electronics will directly start the 32-bit personal computer development plan. But in order to bridge the gap between 8-bit computers and 32-bit computers, there will be a compromise in Aikang's next R&D plan.

Develop an 8-bit computer with great scalability to fill the gap in the company's 16-bit computer. The new PC will still use the 6502 processor as the main CPU, but will add a dedicated interface that can expand a second processor. The main CPU does the IO side of the work, while the other processing tasks are taken care of by the extended CPU.

At the same time, Dongfang Electronics began to communicate with the BBC broadcaster, hoping to cooperate in computer sales. In my previous life, it was because of the broadcast of the documentary "Powerful Microprocessing" that the BBC received a large number of calls from viewers asking about personal computers.

This gave the senior management of the BBC company the original intention of selling a suitable computer equipment to domestic personal computer enthusiasts. Initially, the BBC set a sales target of 10,000 or 20,000 units for the computer, so it chose a small and unknown company as a partner. But no one guessed that the BBCMICRO personal computer specially built by Aikang sold 1.5 million units throughout the eighties.

Since Li Xuan knew this story, he naturally would not give up this low-hanging fruit. Now that the BBC documentary has just been broadcast, and its influence has not yet spread, Dongfang Electronics has rushed to talk about cooperation.

Dongfang Electronics signed a series of advertising contracts with the BBC and gave the BBC a percentage of the sales share, and the two sides quickly reached an agreement. Dongfang Electronics will launch a dedicated PC with reasonable configuration and low price within six months, and the BBC will fully cooperate with the promotion of this new PC in the UK.

Of course, the name of the new computer will definitely not be BBCMICRO anymore, and Dongfang Electronics will naturally not give up such an opportunity to promote its own brand. The name of the new computer will definitely start with acorn, and acorn-best is a good name.

PS: Keith vomits blood update, continue to kneel and beg for recommendation votes!