In fact, in 1982, Wynton Cerf participated in MCI's TV commercial brainstorming sessions by chance and boredom.

He had gone to the MCI Lounge to read the latest issue of a comic book to relax his brain, and happened to hear several other MCI executives discussing their work during their breaks, arguing about what style of ad MCI should shoot and put on the market in order to achieve similar results to the TV commercial that AT&T ran last year.

In 1981, AT&T shot a TV commercial of the same quality as a miniature movie, and the whole commercial was full of human care, and once it was launched, the market share of long-distance calls increased by 5%, which also led many telecom service providers to follow suit and want to replicate this success.

Winton watched AT&T's commercial, which is known as a classic short film, which is actually a story about the relationship between mother and son, the son calls his mother in a foreign land, the son has been choking up and caring about his mother on the phone, the mother asks her son softly, the superb acting skills of the two look very touching, and the final climax is that the mother asks her son why he keeps choking when he calls, and the son answers, just because I love you. Finally, there is a short voice-over: AT&T, only 70 cents, let love cross thousands of miles.

As a straight man in science, Winton has always felt that this commercial is useless, his hometown is New Haven, Connecticut, but now he has been staying in California on the other side of the United States, so he needs to use long-distance phone calls to talk to his parents frequently, and no one knows better than him what it is like to talk to his family on long-distance phones, and whether both parties will be speechless and full of warmth.

So he told his colleagues in the lounge who were full of praise for AT&T's ads that AT&T's ads could only deceive those who rarely used long-distance calls with the skin of so-called humanistic care, and could not make users who used long-distance calls emotionally resonate.

Then he also showed those colleagues what the conversation between mother and son was like in a real long-distance phone call, and he dialed his mother's phone.

"Winton~What are you calling back for?!!!" The woman ringing on the phone with the speakerphone on is loud enough to make the entire lounge echo.

Winton responded to the phone in a voice not much louder than his mother's: "Mom! I wear hearing aids! You don't have to be so loud! It scared the hell out of my colleagues! Be quiet! I can hear you clearly! ”

"That's good! Hang up! Long distance calls are too expensive! Write as much as you can! The professor's mother yelled on the other side of the country, and then simply hung up.

After the presentation, the professor looked at the colleagues: "What mother do you think can have a warm three-minute call with her son like in the advertisement, and still allow him to waste most of his time choking?" If I were going to shoot an MCI TV commercial, I would simply bring in the AT&T commercial and reshoot an exact mother-son phone call, just swapping out the son's last line, and when the mother asked her son why he was crying, the son told her that AT&T was too expensive for long-distance calls. ”

"Finally, change the narration to: MCI, so that the price of love across thousands of miles is as low as 50 cents per minute."

He just took his words as small talk when he was relaxed, and went back to drinking coffee and reading comics, but after a private discussion by several heads of the MCI, they thought that Professor Cerf's proposal was very good, and after a few days, he went to Winton-Cerf and asked him to repeat the last two sentences he said that day, confirming that they were Winton's original, because they were going to be used in the commercial.

At that time, Winton knew that these goods contacted the advertising production company, invited the pair of actors who helped AT&T shoot the commercial, and reshot an MCI version of the mother-son call.

The MCI version is a comedy with a much better effect, ending with the same two lines that Winton Cerf had in mind.

When it was launched, viewers thought it was a rerun of a classic ad, until the last line was reversed, only to find out that it was a new ad from another long-distance phone service provider, MCI, and easily remembered the message that the ad was trying to tell them, that is, AT&T's long-distance call fee was too expensive, and MCI only needed 50 cents per minute for long-distance calls.

In the year the ad was launched, MCI's long-distance phone market share increased by 6%, and together with AT&T's advertisement, it became the only long-distance call advertisement remembered by American audiences in that era.

MCI's chairman, McGowan, bought all the consoles and games on the market afterwards and gave them to Professor Winton-Cerf in person, thanking him for providing MCI with brilliant advertising ideas.

Tommy can understand his professor's interest, he doesn't like to devote himself to it, helping others design advertisements, he just uses this as a small game to relax, change his brain, and he likes to do this kind of flashy little action very much, and has said many times in class that when the software industry booms and the Internet becomes popular, there will be more and more events like him helping MCI plan advertisements when he is bored but is very successful, because the Internet can make many people around the world. Witnessing a mediocre ordinary person show his extraordinary inner self through a flash of inspiration, this is the charm of the Internet, breaking the distance and space, and telling the world that you are extraordinary.

He even predicted early on that with the development of computer software and hardware and the Internet, many garbage movies will win the opportunity to change their faces, and there will definitely be professional fans who will adjust those ugly movies through software and reinterpret them on the Internet for everyone to compare and appreciate, so that everyone can see how garbage turns into gold, and fans are better than directors.

"What do you want to advertise, Tommy? Are you pure soul? Winton finished reading the magazine, smiled and looked up at Tommy.

Tommy sat across from him and spread his hands: "Jason urged me to AmigaOS for two years. ”

Professor Winton recalled, and then realized that it was a graphical operating system software that Tommy's gang had picked up earlier.

As early as 1982, when almost all computers were still operating with text commands, five programmers from Atari Games jumped out to form Amiga, because they were dissatisfied with Atari, and planned to develop a new game console on their own.

Amiga is the Spanish word for female friend, and in addition to trying to confuse her work with other bad terms in the computer industry, the name also represents the importance that the five game otaku attach to this venture, and cherish the game console they created as much as their girlfriends.

The company's initial start-up capital came from a dentist in Florida who liked to play Atari games, and when several guys were employed in Atari, the dentist often contacted them to discuss the game plot, or told each other in time after discovering game bugs, and after learning that these guys came out to start a business, the dentist found two friends who were also dentists, and the three dentists made up 100,000 yuan to support Amiga's development of more fun game consoles.

When the ambition of the Amiga company, which has a huge amount of money of 100,000 yuan, happened to be when Tommy drove a battered classic car as a freshman to Stanford University, the two sides happened to come to Stanford together, Tommy studied at Stanford University, and the Amiga five-member group started a business in Stanford Industrial Park, that is, Silicon Valley.

A year later, Tommy reached his first pinnacle with OSS and autobiography, while the Amiga Venture Five suffered the 1983 American video game crash.

In the first half of 1983, the total sales of games in the United States were $3.3 billion, and in the second half of the year, they fell directly to less than 300 million, directly causing dozens of small game console manufacturers and low-end home game computer manufacturers who wanted to come in to grab money and go bankrupt, and nearly 2,000 game halls were closed.

Amiga's five otaku originally wanted to build the game console of their dreams, but they just started their business and suffered a blow on their heads, and 100,000 yuan was simply not enough to support the prototype to be released, and they originally wanted to develop to a certain stage, and use the results to find new investors in the capital market, but now the general environment in the game industry is facing a collapse, and many investors with money in their hands are afraid to take the business card when they hear that it is a game development company looking for investment, and they don't even bother to pick up the business card, so they leave on the spot.

As for the original three Florida dentists, they have now been completely suffocated by the investment they made for their dreams, and even changed their phone numbers in order to prevent them from being called by a few guys to ask for additional investment.

In order to find new investors, the leader of the five, Jay Mainer, the founder of Amiga, had an idea, the game industry collapsed, but the computer software industry is booming.

I rummaged through the materials that I had burned money to develop before, and found that only the Amiga-Dos disk operating system was barely related to the computer software, this system was originally developed for game console users, and the graphics library was also intimately added, and the graphical operation interface was developed, so that users can understand how to get started with the game console more intuitively through the icons on the screen when they open the game console, and reduce the time to read and explain the various instructions of the secretary.

So he changed the face of this thing, claiming that it was a new generation of graphical computer operating system, and embarked on the road of finding unjust investors, and the first unjust seed he identified was Tommy Hawke, who became a millionaire by selling his autobiography at Stanford University.

Jay Meiner's idea was very simple, Tommy Hawk is a freshman who developed OSS document processing software, and he is also a nerd who came over from his freshman years, and understands what this kind of computer genius students are, they must like to play games, they like to have a crush on beautiful girls, and they should have a lot of common topics with their five otaku, and this kind of person suddenly gets rich, and he shouldn't look forward to spending money, and he is easy to spend impulsively, and he is a genius in the nerd group, How can you flicker tens of thousands of dollars from the other party's pocket for emergency relief.

With this preconceived stereotype, I deliberately asked my SSD friends at his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, to help connect with him, and only then did he ask Tommy and Jason from Stanford University to make an appointment.

As soon as the Amiga operating system was revealed, Jason angrily accused five nerds of cheating money, isn't this a game console interface with a graphical shell added to DOS? Which computer operating system does not consider improving and optimizing, and first consider adding the function of adapting to the game stick in your own system?

Jay had lost hope when he heard Jason's reaction, and Tommy and Jason didn't seem to be able to connect with the nerds they had imagined.

As a result, I didn't expect Tommy to look very deceitful, so he stopped Jason from continuing, and instead asked about various details of the development, including the user interface, window menu, and other professional questions about how to complete the call implementation, Jay saw that the other party asked in a sincere tone, so he could only continue to draw pies in the direction of the operating system, what as long as it relies on the right chip, it can achieve multitasking, and has strong graphics processing capabilities.

Then Tommy, under Jason's obstruction, resolutely said that he would invest in this operating system, and invest financial support in batches according to the research and development progress, tentatively for five years, with the first investment of 500,000.

In hindsight, Jay Meiner recalled that the contract he signed was more like exchanging his dream for dollars.

Although Amiga has injected new capital, it has completely turned its back on its original dream of becoming a world-renowned game company, focusing on the development of a true computer graphics operating system.

That meeting with Jay Meiner, although Winton Cerf did not witness it with his own eyes, but after listening to Tommy's reason for investing, Winton Cerf understood that the success of this young man was not due to luck, but to vision.

It was the beginning of 1984, and only Apple computers on the market had a rudimentary graphical interface, and they were limited by the display and could only be displayed in black and white, while other computer systems, whether Windows or Unix, were all character command line interfaces that made ordinary people who had never touched a computer feel a headache at a glance.

Tommy said in a chat with him at the time that the graphical interface of the operating system is the key to making computers a necessity for ordinary families, and you can't let consumers learn all kinds of cumbersome DOS commands in order to buy computers, but let computers learn to adapt to consumers, so that it no longer seems to have the arrogance of no one to enter.

It wasn't until 1987, a month after Microsoft launched Windows 2.0, that AmigoOS 1.0, which took nearly 100 Stanford University graduates to polish in five years, relied on Benjamin Rosen's Compaq and Stephen Ben's Dell to enter the market.

More colorful than Apple's system, more intuitive to operate than Windows 2.0, the only drawback is that it can only match Intel's 386 chip, which has just been launched for less than two years, while the other two operating systems that occupy a huge market run smoothly on lower-end 32-bit processors.

So at that time, this system was only bundled with high-end machines priced at more than 1,800 yuan by Compaq and Dell, and was not sold separately, and only about 60,000 high-end computers equipped with AmigoOS system were sold on the market, and some of them were still in the European market, and there were only about 40,000 units in the United States.

At that time, Amgia had already implemented multitasking windowing, screen layout changes, task manager, WordPad, Paint, printer matching manager, schedule manager and other functions, and built-in OSS software to meet the needs of non-professionals to deal with daily documents and two mini-games that reflect the smoothness of the system and powerful graphics.

Winton knew that Jason, Jay and others had approached Tommy many times, and even Jason had come to convince him to agree to them to optimize or even streamline AmigaOS, so that the system could be allowed on lower-end computers, and then quickly break into the low-end computer market.

However, every time Tommy refused, Jason had a phone argument with Tommy every once in a while, and even ran to see a psychiatrist under pressure, after all, everyone realized that the AmigaOS system was better, and even Compaq and Dell executives came to Jason and Jay, hoping to run this great operating system on low-end computers.

"Two months ago, Intel announced that its latest 486 processors were available in unlimited quantities, so the 386 processors were reduced to a low-to-mid-range cabbage price that ordinary families could afford, and then you came back and were ready to peddle the Amiga?" Winton-Cerf sighed: "Quinn really didn't say you wrong, you're like a fly, only the smell of money can make you appear." ”

"No, not only that, I've waited so long, not for the big price drop in processors, but for the return of my continuous donations in these buildings over the years, I want to have a built-in graphical web browser in AmigaOS, and the MCI-Mail software program that waives the annual fee for one year, I want everyone to go back and connect the phone line, and they can open the door to a new world with Amiga." Tommy's eyes sparkled at Wynton Cerf, his eyes full of heat:

"Also, I guess you won't pay attention to other small things, such as the related patents of hypertext and hyperlinks that support interactive web browsers, which have been registered and held by Stanford University and are protected by the U.S. Constitution."

"You know that if you let Stanford get the patent rights in advance, the court will not be able to support Stanford's claim in the end, even if there is no other company to lobby, because that means that the Internet and the browser working environment and the way of working will be forced to change." After hearing Tommy say that Stanford University has registered the patent rights for those successful developments, Professor Winton said in the affirmative.

If these things are applied for patents by Stanford University, and finally recognized by the U.S. courts, he, as the president of the International Federation for Information Processing, will be the first to stand up against it, he is sure that the court will not recognize the validity of the patent in the end, so he can calmly tell Tommy that even if those patent rights are temporarily due to the lack of relevant regulatory rights and relevant references, they need to slowly review the ruling, but the final result is only one. That is to be sentenced to invalidity.

"I know." Tommy said.

This answer made Winton couldn't help but take off his glasses, and he looked at Tommy suspiciously:

"Son, I've seen a lot of computer practitioners, some of them support the free and open Internet, some oppose the free and open Internet, but you are the most contradictory one, you are trying to promote the definition of information and regulatory rights on the Internet in the Communications Law, it seems like you want the Internet to be truly open and free, but now you tell me that you have set up a very strong obstacle to Internet freedom, and you deliberately made Stanford University submit the key to the Internet world, that is, the relevant patent rights of the browser. No matter how you look at it, you look like an opponent of Internet freedom, so tell me, is it more important for you that the Internet is free and open, or is it more important for you to have the Internet closed? ”

Tommy shrugged: "It doesn't matter to me whether the Internet is free or not, whether the Internet belongs to me or not belongs to Stanford is important to me. ”

“So？” Winton asked with a smirk.

"So, if users use the key given to them by Stanford to open the door to the Internet, then the Internet can be free and open to them, and if other manufacturers want to use their keys to help users open the door to the Internet, what Stanford has to do is to turn away all those manufacturers and users until the user changes the key provided by Stanford and then opens the door." Tommy leaned forward and approached his professor:

"I want to make the audience understand one thing when they see this ad, and that is to choose AmigaOS, to be able to sit at home and face the future."

"You're going to use that non-discriminatory regulatory clause from the FCC and the patent rights you let Stanford University hold to delay as much time as possible for Apple's and Microsoft's operating software to open the door to the Internet for ordinary users, and use that time to quickly eat up the market." Winton sighed sullenly, as the godfather of the Internet, this bastard had already said things so clearly, how could he not know Tommy's purpose:

"You didn't choose to hold the patents yourself, not because you were generous enough, but because you understood that if you held those bullshit patents, those big companies wouldn't care at all, and they would just launch the infringement and plagiarism quickly, but if the holder is Stanford University, if they dare to infringe on the legal rights of Stanford University before the court rules that invalidates the patent rights that hinder the development of the industry, Stanford University and the huge alumni community it has at the moment can make Microsoft, Apple and even IBM understand what it means to be in pain."

(End of chapter)