The office of Zheru Baodao subsidiary is next to Jian Mingren and Wang Xueling's Volkswagen Computers, and a small number of employees are cross-sectional in their positions.

According to Tang Huan's idea, Fangyuan Computer's operation on Baodao adopts a localized strategy, and is basically handed over to Volkswagen Computers, which can avoid many unnecessary troubles, and the business scope of Zheru's subsidiary will be more comprehensive.

Tang Huan inspected it and was quite satisfied. However, the focus of Volkswagen Computer is now completely on the Fangyuan Computer, and he ignored the Xiaobawang game console, which made him feel a little unhappy.

However, it is no wonder that the large-scale listing of Fangyuan Computers is destined to promote the progress of society's informatization. Under the special situation of Baodao, it will just win the favor of some people, thus gaining both fame and fortune, so that the motivation will naturally be more sufficient.

Zheru American Corporation produced some prototypes, most of which were transported to Baodao by plane, and placed them in the office of Volkswagen Computer to display them for customers. The factory in Hsinchu Science Park is still carrying out equipment assembly and debugging, and the orders here are already piled up, which shows the market's hunger and thirst.

There are a group of people visiting now, and they are accompanied by Jian Mingren himself.

"Mr. Tang, that is Mr. Zhu Bangfu, the inventor of Cangjie's input method." Shi Chongtang introduced softly.

Tang Huan said unexpectedly, but unexpectedly met this great man who was praised by Chinese people in Baodao and Xiangjiang as the "father of Chinese computers" in the history of Chinese computer development.

Zhu Bangfu was born in 1937. His father was a very influential figure in the military and political circles.

When he was young, Zhu Bangfu moved due to war and finally settled in Baodao at the age of middle school. Later, he went to Brazil to develop and stayed in the United States for a period of time. During this period, his mother and father died one after another.

When Zhu Bangfu worked at the Brazilian Cultural Publishing House, he witnessed how Chinese printing technology was lagging behind in the publishing process of a book compared to English, so he changed his career and devoted himself to improving Chinese printing technology.

In 1973, Zhu Bangfu returned to Baodao. During his hard life in the following years, he followed his ideas and took Chinese typewriters as his practical goal, developed Chinese search methods and improved Chinese printing technology.

Later, with the assistance of Ms. Shen Honglian, Zhu Bangfu invented the Chinese style and character checking method using 52 letters as search keys at the end of 1976, namely the "Cangjie Input Method". Zhu Bangfu, who did not understand computers, began to come into contact with computer program languages ​​at this time.

At present, with the help of friends, Zhu Bangfu has set up a computer company to develop Chinese terminals.

Since microcomputers are not yet popular and not practical, Zhu Bangfu has attracted a lot of negative criticism from the society.

The business community is not optimistic about the Chinese computer market and is unwilling to invest; scientific and technological personnel in the academic community advocate eliminating Chinese as soon as possible.

Zhu Bangfu was ridiculed. His situation can be described as being isolated and helpless.

But now, Fangyuan computer has emerged, and its real functions are in front of you. Whoever dares to question the computer processing of Chinese information is to be snatched, and Zhu Bangfu, who is still in the technical exploration stage, found a beacon guiding the direction.

"Mr. Tang, I have been very lucky to have admired your name for a long time."

After seeing Tang Huan, Zhu Bangfu took the initiative to greet him without anyone introducing him, "The Fangyuan Computer you invented is a great innovation."

"Mr. Zhu is too much, I really feel ashamed." Tang Huan immediately greeted him enthusiastically.

According to the original historical development, in 1980, with the technical support of Shi Zhenrong, Zhu Bangfu and Acer jointly developed a Chinese computer with "Chinese operating system, Chinese programming language, and Chinese set software" - Tianlong Chinese Computer, which costs NT$750,000. But obviously, a personal computer with a price of NT$20,000 is impossible to win the market.

The following year, Zhu Bangfu launched a Chinese terminal, and later he established Zero One Computer Company to provide low-cost computer cultural services to manufacturers.

In order to make Chinese computers more popular and let the Chinese study together, Zhu Bangfu published a newspaper to declare that he would give up the patent right of Cangjie's input method, announced that he would be willing to disclose all the technology and sell shares of Zero One Company at a price of NT$10 million.

The relevant parties in Baodao agreed with the proposal and commissioned technicians from Wang An, Acer and Shentong to go to Zero One Company for detailed appraisal, and Zhu Bangfu gave a public explanation. The proposal was finally approved, and the final result of the acquisition was planned to be determined in 1983.

But during this period, there was a dispute between the 13,000-word Big5 code formulated by relevant parties in Baodao and Zhu Bangfu's Chinese coding system that can accommodate more than 50,000 words.

In addition, some people reported that Zhu Bangfu's system was also promoted and used to the mainland. Therefore, Zhu Bangfu left Baodao in April 1983, hid in the United States, and transferred all the ownership of Zero One Company to employees.

Since then, Zhu Bangfu has become further and further away from his ideal of Chinese information computer processing.

But no matter what, Zhu Bangfu can be regarded as a legendary figure.

Looking at Zhu Bangfu, who was in his early forties and full of energy, Tang Huan couldn't help but feel regret and emotion when he thought of his gains and losses in his Chinese information computer processing career.

If a computer wants to process various information in binary, it must use encoding technology to identify various basic components.

In this regard, Western languages ​​like English, which have only 26 basic letters and can be encoded with just a 128-bit ASCII table, have natural advantages, while Chinese is much more troublesome.

From a logical perspective, although Chinese characters can be divided into different basic components of radicals, radicals, etc., there are too many, far more than 26. Moreover, these basic components also have changes in position, orientation, and orientation when forming Chinese characters.

Therefore, it is difficult to classify and process Chinese information based on text structure as the standard.

Some radical technicians even used this to advocate the elimination of Chinese characters. For China, which invented papermaking and printing, this phenomenon is a bit sad.

On the road to overcoming these difficulties, many famous Chinese people emerged, such as Zhu Bangfu, Ni Guangnan, Wang Xuan, Wang Yongmin, etc. It can be said that it took more than ten years of hard work to gradually solve this problem.

As a rebirth, Tang Huan naturally needs to shorten this process so that Chinese people have more time to pay attention to other technologies such as operating systems and networks.

First of all, Tang Huan has planned a set of encoding schemes including simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese fonts - Tang Code, which directly covers the contents of GB-2312 and Big5 in the original time and space.

With the strong popularity of Fangyuan Computer, Tang Code will inevitably become an industry standard until the official standard.

Secondly, in terms of input method, Tang Huan chose a simple and easy-to-use pinyin input method.

The basic education here in Baodao is taught by phonetic notes. Traditional Chinese characters are the phonetic input method, while simplified Chinese characters are the pinyin input method.

Of course, the entire project is very workload, and Tang Huan cannot complete it with his own strength, and there is no need. He only planned a general framework, realized the functions of pioneering and core modules, and then arranged Jian Mingren to do the traditional Chinese characters. As for the work on simplified Chinese characters, Tang Huan is looking for someone to promote it. I believe my aunt will recommend the right person to him.

However, these difficulties are only intellectual software overhead, and hardware cost factors must also be taken into account.

After the text is sorted and encoded according to certain rules and can be retrieved by input method, everything is still not a good thing. In order to display them, the computer must also arrange a matching storage space. The ASCII table containing 26 basic letters in English is not much, but the font library containing thousands of Chinese characters is expensive.

For example, in order to allow Epson's 7-needle printer to print out Chinese characters, the printhead must be divided into odd and even lines according to the settings of the 12x12 dot matrix font library to complete the printing of a Chinese character.

In this font library, the dot matrix information of a Chinese character requires 32 bytes of storage space.

The traditional Chinese font library created by Jian Mingren contains nearly 10,000 characters. Generally speaking, the storage space required reaches 320K, which is unbearable for microcomputers.

You should know that the current mainstream 8-bit CPUs, such as Intel's 8080, Zilog's Z80, Motorola's 6800, and MOSTechnology's 6502, have the largest addressing address space of 64K. Apple's current hot-selling second-generation machine is only equipped with 48KB of memory.

Seeing this, Tang Huan had to put on the market again and use data compression technology to reduce the space occupied by the Chinese character library to an acceptable level, which makes it possible to be commercially available.

Fortunately, during this period, Japan's electronics industry developed rapidly, the selling price of various components dropped rapidly, and the cost and profits were both taken into account. This is also a major reason why Tang Huan left the United States and went to Asia to open a factory.

Therefore, in the original historical time and space, the road to computer informationization of Chinese characters is very tortuous.

Now, Tang Huan set the direction and framework at the beginning. Although no one has realized the greatness of this work, time will tell everything, and it doesn’t matter if you temporarily hide your merits and fame.

Comparing Tang Huan and Zhu Bangfu's practices in Chinese information computer processing, you will find that Tang Huan, who is proficient in technology trends and well versed in market laws, is relatively pragmatic, while Zhu Bangfu is somewhat idealistic.

Of course, if Zhu Bangfu is willing to accept the support provided by Tang Huan in the early stages of personal computer development, his ideal of a comprehensive Chinese information computer processing system with the word code, character shape, character order, pronunciation, meaning, and character identification may not be possible.

In this way, the preservation and research of various ancient Chinese books will also be a great boost.

"I'm telling the truth. Seeing the functions of Fangyuan Computer, I find that my research direction seems to need to be adjusted." Zhu Bangfu looked at Tang Huan and said sincerely.

Tang Huan pondered slightly, "Mr. Zhu, I am frank, you may not be good at the underlying computer technology. It is better to concentrate all your energy on the sorting of Chinese coding and the design of input methods, and the hardware will be left to a dedicated person."

Zhu Bangfu showed a puzzled look on his face, "I don't really understand the division of labor you said."

"For example, Fangyuan Computer, there is a circuit board inside it, which I call a Han card, which is specially used to store Chinese character library, process Chinese character input and Chinese character display. Remove the Han card, Fangyuan Computer is an ordinary English computer. If you install the Han card, it becomes a Chinese computer." Tang Huan explained patiently.

Zhu Bangfu nodded suddenly, "In other words, I just need to concentrate on designing another Han card with more comprehensive support for Chinese characters, and then install it on the Fangyuan computer."

Tang Huan smiled and nodded. Of course, the specific implementation will not be that simple, and it also involves support details such as operating system, but the general idea is this.

"Listen to your words is better than reading for ten years. Mr. Tang, how about we have a few drinks for dinner? I'll treat you to you." Zhu Bangfu said excitedly.

"I'm naturally looking for it, but Mr. Zhu is here, and Zheru Company should be responsible for the reception." Tang Huan laughed loudly, turned to Shi Chongtang and said, "Chongtang, arrange a restaurant for us later."

Shi Chongtang nodded and agreed, and then whispered: "Miss Lin is here, right in the office."

Tang Huan said calmly, and then made a sorry gesture to Zhu Bangfu, "Mr. Zhu, please visit as you like, I'll deal with other things."

After saying goodbye, Tang Huan quickly returned to the office and saw Lin Fengjiao waiting quietly.

"You are not feeling well, why don't you rest more?" Tang Huan walked over and said with concern.

"It's okay. Seeing you busy all day, you must be very troubled. I specially made soup and sent it to you to replenish your body." Lin Fengjiao smiled gently.
Chapter completed!