A few days later, at the end of October.

After Gu Ao completed the hardware layout of Tiankun and Wang An, he focused all his energy on the development of software exclusive to the first-party platform.

Under Microsoft's aggressive competitive attitude, companies with closed operating systems, whether they are computers or game consoles, will always be the most important competitive tool for the next ten years, which is easy to use and unique software that can solve the pain points of unique needs.

In the past few years, Wang An WPS computer and Apple MAC-II, compared with the wild Microsoft MS-DOS computer, has a relatively obvious advantage, which is the "keyboard and mouse drawing design software" series, including CAD/PS/PROTEL and other series of things.

However, it is quite difficult to port to WPS-BOOK laptops now.

The main reason is that the LCD screens of this era can display too few colors.

Historically, the first 700C 10.4-inch screen ThinkPad launched by IBM in the second half of 1992 had only eight colors on the screen. Because IBM did not intervene in Sharp's LCD layout several years in advance, John Ax bought Sharp's ready-made goods, and IBM used whatever Sharp could build.

The size of Gu Ao can use now is at most larger than IBM's, but it is impossible to say how rich the colors are.

During the same period, many other LCD products are still using black and white screens.

Screens with such few colors are definitely not used to create scenes like PS for fashion and art designers.

However, software commonly used by engineers such as CAD/PROTEL can be perfectly ported.

Moreover, so far, the versions of CAD software on Microsoft's DOS system still have not developed keyboard and mouse drawing versions, which can allow WPS to continue to occupy this unique market segment for another two years.

Perhaps, it is because Microsoft has expanded too quickly and has extensively captured land, so I didn’t expect to work hard to grab the market segment.

After all, three years ago, Microsoft's market value was less than US$5 billion, but now it is more than 20 billion. The doubled rate is still very fast. The carrots are fast and don't wash the mud, which is what it means to be such a nouveau riche.

However, no matter how slow Microsoft responds, this exclusive segmentation will only have an advantage for one or two years. After the products from the WIN95 era come out, Microsoft will definitely not let itself have its own functional blind dimensions.

As for whether the laptop's CPU processing capabilities and memory can support the above software, there is no need to worry about it.

After four years of great development, the current Wangan WPS-BOOK will use Motorola's latest G2 processor developed for POWER-PC, with a main frequency of 30MHz.

Even if an amateur only looks at the indicators, he can see that this thing is better than the 1988 version of the 68000 series with the 10Mhz main frequency.

Because there is still no concept of graphics cards, when building new desktops in the future, Wang'an will still consider drawing on the design of the 1988 WPS computer, making dual chips, one G2 is the CPU, and the other is the audio and image processing.

However, it would be too terrifying to have two G2s on the laptop to heat up, so there was only one piece. The processing functions of the audio card graphics card were all based on the later practice of "integrating sound card/integrating graphics card" and sacrificing part of the CPU's computing power.

Therefore, if you only look at the calculation and processing indicators, WPS-BOOK, which will be launched next year, will be 50% stronger than desktops 4 years ago. However, if it is a new desktop and an old desktop, it can be tripled.

There will be no accidents in these fields, they are just extensions of Moore's Law.

To put it another way, the latest Motorola CPU used by Wang An is not inferior to the latest version of Intel's 386 series in performance. Intel's 386 series was released in 1992, and it basically only released the 20MHz main frequency model, other caches, digits, buses... The mixed indicators do not have any advantages for Motorola.

Intel's only advantage is that the X86 architecture is relatively popular, and it has truly achieved integration of industry standards with Microsoft's hitchhiking.

Therefore, if history does not change, G2 will be the last product that Motorola can functionally win the local advantages over Intel's products during the same period.

By around 1994 and 1995, when Motorola's CPU entered the G3 era, it was already unable to do so and completely swept into the garbage dump of history by Intel.

Firstly, the Iridium Project, which consumed most of Motorola's resources, would fail. Secondly, Intel's ally Microsoft will launch WIN95, and then for Motorola, it would be an avalanche ending.

But at least now, Gu Ao can still work with this broken ship for a few years, taking advantage of the opportunity of his teammates not distinguishing the virtuous and foolish, buying beads and refusing to kill the money, snatching the benefits, and finally jumping the ship.

...

Since all new applications with fancy and fancy effects cannot become a differentiated competitive advantage in WPS-BOOK, there are very few cards that can be played in the field of "independent software".

Wang An has always been strong in office applications, and the needs of discovery have been discovered long ago.

Gu Ao can only hope for an epoch-making and heavy application.

It is also an application that is not only used for WPS-BOOK laptops, but also can be compatible with the old desktop computers of WPS, which means it can be used on machines with WPS-OS's own operating system.

Hard work pays off. Before getting off work that night, John Chambers gave him good news.

"Boss, the software department has already made some predictions about the thing you arranged two months ago - based on the WW-WEB of Brittany, Tim Lee, developed an independent kernel accessor that supports graphics operations and file folder browsing.

The agreement also uses the WWW protocol, but because there is no authorization from the service provider, it cannot be used for the time being, we can only spend money to simulate the test."

When John Chambers came to report, the head of the software department also came to show it. The two of them took a semi-finished laptop engineering prototype and a pre-installed test desktop to demonstrate to Gu Ao.

It turns out that Gu Ao's unique application that he hopes to win a short-term advantage is a browser.

Of course, developing a browser in 1991 was a high-tech job. It was absolutely impossible to use other people's browser kernels like the small brands in later generations. Just putting a skin on the outside is counted.

However, don't think too complicated about this thing, because the objects that browsers want to serve are also very simple, and the data and archives to be indexed are also very scarce.

"Very good, I'll see the effect." Gu Ao clicked on the option on the index box, and then searched the archive content in the test database of his own architecture, browsed remotely, turned on, and accessed gateway analysis...

Some basic operations can at least be able to pass.

Some readers who do not understand the early development history of the Internet may feel confused: Where did the Internet come from in 1991? How could they need a browser?

In fact, there was no Internet in the strict sense in 1991, only some "one-level war zone networks" that could be accessed remotely.

However, this "regional network that fights independently" is different from the traditional regional network that began in the early 1980s.

The regional network in the 1980s was similar to the local connection effect of many computers in later companies. It was impossible to add access nodes at random. At that time, it was called UUCP, which was used for networking archive transmission and copying between UNIX system computers.

The person who manages the gateway allows this area network to have as many members and visitors, and as much IP as you are all assigned to you, and they will all be determined (of course, they were not even called an IP address at that time, but there was indeed an addressing tool)

His Excellency Hegel, who once served as Secretary of State and became a director after retirement, the company he served as a director, "American Online", started in 1985, which operated a UUCP online transmission game software sales business.

As for how to achieve remote transmission, it mainly depends on the dialing bandwidth of the telephone line. (At that time, someone used UUCP to send emails, and the nature was similar to sending faxes)

It is hard to imagine in the future. It can be roughly compared to "After you give the other party money, the other party will copy the download file to you online." But it is definitely not like later generations that directly transmit or leave a seed network disk. The operation is very cumbersome and requires specialized senior technicians to debug and operate. Chinese people must have never seen it.

So, in the early 1990s, during the transition period before the Internet emerged, what is the essential difference between those new "scalable regional networks" and UUCP?

In the past two years, there have been two new things that have had a significant impact on future generations.

One is a WWW created by Europeans, which is WorldWideWeb. This thing was originally created by Brittania researcher Tim Lee, and a group of colleagues at the European Nuclear Research Organization, a database search and access tool.

At the beginning, their purpose was to create a knowledge base similar to the Wikipedia database in later generations, where you can access the contents in the database. The verification of access permissions was much simplified than UUCP, and hypertext was added.

(In the 1980s, UUCP needs a gateway to operate and authorize it. Just like an Internet cafe needs to add computers to the regional network, and the network administrator needs to operate manually. Therefore, you cannot "add new visitors directly without anyone's consent", that is definitely not an "open Internet". You have to be able to access the Internet as anyone wants)

WWW (World Wide Web) was born in early 1990. It was 20 months ago when Gu Ao was now.

However, when the World Wide Web was first born, it was not true. The Internet's influence was limited to the European scientific research circle, and only now had about a few hundred paid access nodes developed. (At that time, I had to pay the database operator to go to such a "regional network")

Because technology has developed to this point, there will always be smart people in the world who come up with similar ideas, and the standards and focus are different.

Just over a year after the birth of World Wide Web, before the summer vacation in 1991, Americans also developed a set of things that seem to be very competitive but have slightly different strategies and architecture, which is the "GOPHER" of the University of Minnesota.

There is nothing much to say about the technical details between Gufo.com and Wanwei.com, and no one is interested in writing it. Here we will only talk about the differences in competitive advantages in terms of entry thresholds.

That is, the World Wide Web in the early 1990s did not have the concept of "server". Its original purpose was to provide remote access to databases of scientific research institutions in Europe. Therefore, those who could access the World Wide Web were all mainframes or minicomputers, but no personal computers.

The performance, computing power, and architecture of the personal computer itself are not enough to support direct access to the World Wide Web.

A major advance of Gufo.com is the introduction of the server-customer architecture system. It chose to specifically divide the servers to analyze, allocate, and manage the function variable names or resource addresses, while the client is just an access.

It is equivalent to that from then on, the network has a user-side and a server-side. Before that, the "web page" interface that everyone saw was the same as the debug background interface that programmers saw.

Separating service providers and customers greatly reduces the threshold for "customers" entry and attempts. Therefore, in history, Gufo.com quickly developed tens of thousands of support access nodes around the world in more than a year after its emergence.

However, in later history, it is well known that Wanwei.com won the victory. The main reason is that Gufo.com only has the architectural advantage of "making the entry threshold of 'customer' lower", but the other foundations are not done well.

For example, Gufo.com did not consider the access to pictures and texts at the beginning, and could only access them in plain text, and there were some other disadvantages.

Therefore, Gu Fo's only advantage was that after being "learned, learned and absorbed" by the World Wide Web in 1993, the World Wide Web, which has a more old-fashioned and better professional functions, won again. When humans need a general Internet standard, it naturally received support.

On the other hand, when the World Wide Web was first launched in the early 1990s, it was used for a fee. After seeing the competition from Gufo.com, it finally announced permanent free in early 1993, which is also an important reason for the World Wide Web's victory in competition.

Gufo.com was also free at the beginning, but free for greater benefit. After finding that it could not become an international standard, and after expecting to make a profit based on subsequent benefits, Gufo finally canceled the free, which completely gave up the possibility of competition.

(Note: The struggle here is definitely not as simple as I said, but I am trying to make it easier for most readers to understand it intuitively. If you are interested, you can read professional historical documents, right? You don’t need to go to novels to seek knowledge. Novels can arouse everyone’s interest in learning. I think it is already a very social responsibility.)

The World Wide Web has become a global Internet architecture standard, and has also derived countless technical standards, such as the TCP/IP protocol standard and IPV4 addressing mechanism. The derived needs to set up a root server for global functional variable name resolution, and the physical level is destined that IPV4 root servers can only have 1+12 modes...

In addition, even after the World Wide Web won, Gufo.com did not disappear. That thing has been used in the future, but ordinary netizens will not use it, and there are no conditions. There are many professional remote service systems that later developed based on Gufo's technical route.

Of course, the grudges and entanglements between Gufo.com and Wanwei.com have not yet become increasingly fierce.

At this time at the end of October 1991, the Internet had not yet been born, but two competitors to the Internet standard had been born, and they showed their powers to expand their influence and scope of application.

When they decide the outcome, it is when the Internet is born.

What Gu Ao wants to do is just not waste resources - since the pseudo-Internet of this world has provided a "server-customer" architecture two or three months ago, he certainly needs to configure an interface with a more convenient application level and a lower entry threshold for his WPS-BOOK and old desktops.
Chapter completed!