Rebirth of the Military Industrial Overlord

Jim Clark was excited for a reason.

Serving as a teaching assistant at Stanford is an enviable job, and the income allows him to live the life of an ordinary middle-class American country, but for him with great dreams, this is far from enough, especially when he After his colleague Andy Becktoson left Stanford.

Andy Beckettson's work at Stanford was mainly to assist Stanford to build a campus network, and in carrying out this work, he had a small and his own achievement, and Andy called this achievement "ThreeMillion" .

This achievement named "Three Millions" actually refers to a microcomputer system with one million operations per second, one million bytes of memory, and one million pixel graphics display.

In the 21st century, this microcomputer system, which was not as good as one-thousandth of the performance of the most low-power smartphones, was extremely remarkable in the early 1980s, and Andy left Stanford after completing it, and In February 1982, together with Scott Marconili, he founded a company to produce and sell this kind of microcomputer system, and brazenly picked out the first letters of the phrase "Stanford University Network" and registered it as The name of this company.

Yes, children's shoes, you read that right, the company founded by Andy Baker Tosen is the dazzling company "SUN" in the future.

Perhaps even Andy himself did not expect that this kind of microcomputer system introduced by SUN was so popular in the market. Only half a year later, SUN had made a profit, and its development speed could not be described by rapid development.

Jim Clark was extremely unconvinced about this.

He knows exactly what the first "three million" microcomputer launched by SUN is. It is nothing more than the use of Motorola's mature CPUm68000, plus a virtual memory manager chip developed by himself. It can be called "three million". The most important point is that this virtual memory manager chip can maximize the pre-reading of data into the memory, which improves the efficiency of data transmission between the CPU and the storage device. To achieve the effect of improving computing power is nothing more than a speculative method in Jim's view.

In his opinion, it is not enough to improve memory management capabilities. Motorola's mature m68000 is a "pseudo 32-bit CPU" that has internal 32-bit registers but only 16-bit external bus interface. The performance is not considered That’s great. He hopes to have a CPU with higher computing power. At the same time, it is necessary to add a dedicated graphics computing and processing chip to make the microcomputer have more powerful capabilities, and this workstation-level microcomputer will also be heavily engaged in industrial design. The favorite of engineers.

He told another good friend of his thoughts, Goodfield, who is engaged in art trading, because he knew that among the people around him, only Goodfield had better financial ability, and maybe he could sponsor his own research.

Goodfield did not live up to his hopes. He generously sponsored 25,000 US dollars. After getting the first venture capital, Jim resolutely quit his stable job as a Stanford assistant and began to devote himself to the first SGI. Going to the development of a graphics workstation.

He felt that he was very close to success.

Unfortunately, 25,000 US dollars is really not a big number, even if he adds his own savings over the years, it is far from enough.

He has no money now, to be precise, he is heavily in debt.

If he can no longer get a new investment, then it is very likely that he will not be able to pay the credit card bill next month.

At this moment, he heard that his former colleague and friend Bossac and his wife actually got a venture capital of up to 5 million US dollars, which shocked him beyond compare.

Therefore, after receiving the invitation of the Posacks tonight, he can't wait to come. His original idea was to get the Possacks to squeeze a little money out of the investment they got, even if it was only one hundred thousand. U.S. dollars, no, maybe only $50,000 can help him complete his dream SGI graphics workstation.

What surprised him was that at the party tonight, he actually saw the magical Chinese boy who invested in the Bossacks!

This is simply a gift from God!

Clark felt that he couldn't wait for a minute. He looked at Tan Zhenhua with eyes full of hope and pleading.

The latter shrugged his shoulders slightly and said: "Well, Mr. Doctor, if you insist, and the master doesn't object."

Leonardo on the side smiled and said, "Eric, Jim, please feel free to let me get you two drinks."

While talking, he narrowly squeezed his eyes at Jim Clark, and while turning around, he made a silent mouth at him.

Jim saw that Leonardo’s mouth gestures were: "Good luck."

He nodded gratefully to Leonardo, and invited Tan Zhenhua to sit on the sofa beside him, and then began to introduce his ideas and the progress of research and development.

Tan Zhenhua listened very carefully, and asked some questions from time to time. Although he didn't play IT in his previous life, the computer was his most important work tool, and one of the cores of radar, the signal processing unit, would be fine if it counts. Think of it as a professional computer, but its core is not the CPU, but a more professional processing chip DSP, so he is not unfamiliar with computers, coupled with his accumulation of knowledge far beyond his contemporaries, and Jim, who is a PhD in computer science There were no obstacles to the conversation. On the contrary, Jim was amazed by his many ideas.

"Eric, I can't imagine that a freshman who has only studied electronics for half a year can have your vision and knowledge accumulation. You just proposed to separate the graphics chip and communicate with the CPU through a unified standard bus. The idea of ​​connection is really a genius idea, and in the future we can add professional audio processing equipment, network connection equipment, and video processing equipment to this bus. Our customers only need to buy these individual equipment instead of replacing the entire computer. In that case, our computer will become a complete multimedia processing center and not just limited to graphics processing, and our customers will also save a lot of investment... Oh, my God, this idea will change the world!"

Although Tan Zhenhua’s words of exclamation and exhilaration are very useful to Jim Clark, these are nothing but the results of plagiarizing others. After all, before his rebirth, a small smart phone can fully realize these functions and performance. Go far beyond current computers.

Therefore, Tan Zhenhua just accepted these compliments with a smile and at the same time asked a question that he cared most.

"Then Jim, according to what you just said, you plan to install a brand new, powerful CPU in your computer. Can you introduce it to me?"