Mr. Jobs had always wanted to create something extraordinary, and the PARC graphical user interface was exactly what he had dreamed of, so he was the most excited of the crowd that came to see it, and he made no secret of his intention to push Apple to commercialize the technology.

Tang Huan originally wanted to give Jobs some professional advice when he left.

For example, in order to ensure the system performance of the graphical user interface, the CPU should directly choose the MC68000 of Motorola, and so on, such project development will face problems, so as not to take unnecessary detours.

FROM THE BOTTOM OF HIS HEART, TANG HUAN STILL HOPES THAT APPLE CAN LAUNCH MAC MORE SMOOTHLY THAN IN HIS PREVIOUS LIFE, SO AS TO SHARE THE COMPETITIVE PRESSURE BROUGHT BY IBM.

But Jobs only excitedly pulled Atkinson to make a grand wish - we also want to build such a computer, directly ignored Tang Huan, and quickly got into the car to continue the discussion.

Seeing this scene, Tang Huan shook his head helplessly, since the urine can't be in a pot, then everyone will develop independently.

Because the big boss behaved calmly, so Zheru's group of visitors were also very calm, many engineers were thoughtful about the projects they were engaged in, and felt that the development concept instilled by Tang Huan to them on weekdays was no worse than PARC.

After returning to the company, Tang Huan naturally had a meeting to summarize the harvest of the trip.

"You have not, PARC's technical philosophy, especially in terms of software, is not new to us." Tang Huan's opening remarks said.

Seeing that everyone nodded with deep sympathy, Tang Huan continued, "That shows that this excellent laboratory, which has been established for nearly ten years and has produced many technical achievements, their researchers and we have thought together, and Zheru's technical direction is correct." ”

Tang Huan was very arrogant and put PARC in a subordinate position, but this speech skill strengthened the confidence of Zheru employees more and more.

"Apple saw the graphical user interface, and it was a treasure trove, and the technology was really good, but I felt that PARC's network technology also needed to be taken seriously, and who remembered the name of the network?" Tang Huan deliberately tested.

"Ethernet." Many of them replied in unison, just like elementary school students.

"There is no doubt that PARC's networking philosophy will be the trend of computer development." Tang Huan nodded with satisfaction, "But these things take time to digest, and now they can only be used as a toy for people to enjoy, but the mouse can be developed as soon as possible, so that our customers can work more conveniently." ”

Tang Huan was very calm, and sorted out the many technical achievements of PARC in accordance with the long-term, medium-term, and immediate practical application, and let everyone express some opinions, and finally announced the dismissal of the meeting, and at the same time instructed the recorder to sort out the content of the meeting, so as to make it an achievement and distribute it to all employees for learning, so as to reach a consensus.

In terms of management model, Zheru is somewhat similar to Intel, tightly organized, with clear rules, and the whole enterprise is like a tightly running machine, which is in stark contrast to those typical Silicon Valley companies.

While some of his creativity may be lost as a result, it ensures stability and keeps him organized in the midst of rapid expansion, without letting Gates see the jokes of chaos and collapse.

Among the many means, it is undoubtedly very important to create your own corporate culture.

One of the features of Zheru is that no matter what position they belong to, employees are asked to learn the results of certain meetings.

After dealing with this link, Tang Huan came to the R&D department again, this time focusing on the development of C language programming tools.

Like the hardware bus, the C language is the technical reserve of the software that Tang Huan made for the second-generation Fangyuan computer, and he saw the completed report from the documents submitted regularly, so he came to confirm it.

Originally, this work was very difficult, but thanks to the developed open source community in his previous life, Tang Huan successfully wrote a highly mature C language specification by himself, and wrote a stable Intel8086 CPU version of the compiler core, named ZeroneCrossPlatformC, that is, Zheru CPC, and then handed over to a special five-person team, let them be responsible for the follow-up development of Motorola's MC68000 version, primary function library, etc. according to the roadmap.

In 1978, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Collingham co-published the first edition of The C Programming Language. The C language standard is introduced.

Tang Huan's C language specification is compatible with this standard, but it has also made many improvements.

For example, considering that although Motorola uses a 16-bit CPU as its opponent, the internal register is 32-bit, which is a de facto 32-bit microprocessor, and in the next few years, personal computers will soon enter the era of 32-bit CPUs, so Tang Huan supports the definition of data types more comprehensively and reasonably.

As for the features that ensure the efficiency of the implementation of the C language, such as pointers and inline assembly language, they have been inherited in their entirety after the security restrictions were imposed.

ZeroneMacroAssemble is the company's main development environment, but it will gradually transition to a model based on Zheru CPC and supplemented by MA.

If the former is characterized by macros, then the latter is cross-platform.

After the hardware level is further improved, Tang Huan will introduce the features of object-oriented, template library, etc. one after another.

However, it is estimated that by that time, there will be fewer places to do it yourself.

In order to verify the results of the project, the team developed a scientific calculator program, the same source code, which was compiled into two programs, Intel8086 and MC68000, on the development platforms provided by Intel and Motorola, respectively, and then run.

For a tool as complex as a compiler, the success of research and development requires a comprehensive evaluation, but Tang Huan judged from experience that there was basically no problem.

"Everyone, your R&D results will be useful soon, and the company's next-generation products will be developed using CPC."

Tang Huan first affirmed their work, and then changed his words, "But I have to say sorry, I can only cash out the Christmas red envelopes and project bonuses in the rewards, and it is impossible to take a vacation, because you will soon start the next more important project." ”

In the face of a generous salary system and detailed honor rules, Zheru's engineers behaved very simply, working tirelessly like slaves, producing products that created sales myths one by one.

The five people in front of me are also real people who have been successfully brainwashed, and as soon as they hear that there is a new job, their eyes immediately shine with fanatical light.

After Tang Huan encouraged them again, he returned to his office and began to think carefully about the development plan of the second-generation Fangyuan computer.

Regardless of whether IBM has really started the chess project, Zheru now has to enter the next-generation product development cycle as soon as possible.

Due to the fact that the plan involved too much information, Tang Huan lived and ate in the company for the next few days.

In order to reduce the risk, the whole plan is divided into two routes, that is, the microprocessor adopts Intel8086 and MC68000 respectively.

The most superficial difference between the two is that all of the Intel 8086's internal registers, internal and external data buses are 16-bit wide and are fully 16-bit microprocessors, while the external address bus is 20 bits and has a physical addressing space of 1MB. The MC68000 uses a 32-bit bus and registers internally, and a 24-bit external address bus, with a physical addressing space of 16MB.

It is clear that, on the face of it, the MC68000 is more advanced than the Intel 8086, and in fact it is.

For example, since the register width of the Intel 8086 is smaller than the width of the external address bus, in order to be able to access the entire address space, a special addressing calculation is required - segmented addressing, which is somewhat cumbersome, while the MC68000 is much better.

In previous lives, even though it was MC68000 eventually eliminated from the PC market due to technological advances, it was still widely used in industrial control systems, consumer and embedded fields.

It wasn't until 1996 that Motorola discontinued the MC68000 of the HMOS process.

In Tang Huan's view, the second-generation Xiaobawang game console will basically derive from the branch of MC68000.

But advanced technology does not necessarily mean market success, Intel's 8086 and Microsoft's DOS illustrate this, so Tang Huan also uses Intel8086 as a research and development branch.

If both are successful, it's a big deal to operate in different grades.

Because the current version of the MC68000 instruction set does not support key features such as virtual memory, Tang Huan does not plan to spend too much energy on multitasking operating systems, and uses CPC to develop an operating system based on FreeDOS, an open source community in his previous life, like Intel8086.

Although the graphical user interface will not be supported for the time being, DOSShell will be provided with a tool similar to the Windows Explorer in the previous life to help ordinary users operate the computer more conveniently.

Because the second-generation Fangyuan computer uses a 16-bit CPU, it will bring the development of personal computers to the third generation, in order to let everyone know this clearly, so Tang Huan funnily named this plan "386".

The biggest imaginary enemy of the 386 plan is IBM-PC, and naturally in addition to Tang Huan's personal opinions, most of its content is based on IBM-PC technical indicators, making various reasonable supplements and catching up.

The rebirth broadened his horizons, allowing Tang Huan to know the direction of the entire project and how to divide the complex R&D tasks into modules that can be paralleled.

Even so, Tang Huan's style is still very steady, and he does not set the same rash pace as Steve Jobs asked Atkinson "how long it will take to develop a graphical user interface" and Atkinson's ignorant people fearlessly replied "six months", and he set the development cycle for one year.

As long as it is guaranteed that the mature second-generation Fangyuan computer can be launched in the first half of 1981, it should be able to take the lead against IBM-PC.

In the first phase of Project 386, Tang Huan plans to set up two teams of about 12 people, let them make prototypes separately, evaluate them, and then move on to the next stage of work.

Tang Huan has been in the office these days, which naturally aroused the curiosity of the employees.

When the bearded and unkempt Tang Huan announced the convening of the meeting, the engineers who were named into the conference room finally knew the answer, it turned out that their boss was planning a big plan to confront the blue giant.