Going to the next level

Author: Erzi Congzhou

Hong Kong Island is not severely restricted by the United States, so the Internet on Hong Kong Island is now far more advanced than that on the mainland. It has completed full-featured access and is developing rapidly.

Now the Internet on Hong Kong Island has actually passed the academic traction stage and begun to enter the exploration and growth stage.

This period actually refers to the gradual establishment of the general public's awareness and acceptance of the Internet and its steady growth.

During this period, the first batch of Internet companies will be established one after another and their business will be booming. At the same time, they will also have to experience the test brought by the Internet bubble period, complete the successful exploration of the Internet business model, and lay a solid foundation for the next period of rapid development.

Base.

Today, Hong Kong Island has opened a 64K international dedicated line to connect to the Internet. The University of Hong Kong has also built its own 64K campus LAN, and many things can be transmitted interactively through the network.

Although it can be said to be quite advanced, researchers on Hong Kong Island seem to have not yet found the right direction for development.

Until now, the main application methods have remained at the stage of file retrieval and email sending.

In other words, the portal era of the Internet, where "content is king", has just emerged, and is still far from the era of social networks, where "relationship is king" and the main focus is to capture users.

As someone who has experienced this, Zhou Zhi certainly knows the successful products and ideas left behind in this process. Back then, he used spare resources to build a server in a state-owned unit, which included a full set of community forum functions, as well as some small games and a server called ICQ.

Live chat tool.

At first, this server was only used by my technical colleagues. It was very convenient to transfer small programs and files to each other.

Later, some people who were too idle began to post novels and content scraped from the Internet to the forum, which immediately attracted the interest of many people.

As more and more people used it, this communication forum soon became a popular small website in the intranet of state-owned enterprises.

Then discordant voices began to appear in the forum, and the business discussion area gradually evolved into a "complaint leadership area". What's more, it was originally used to use idle resources, but when there were more users, it turned into seizing resources.

Finally, the leader ordered to shut down the server.

Although surfing was unsuccessful in his previous life, Zhou Zhi is no stranger to building application platforms.

It's a pity that the ICQ source code back then was scrapped. Zhou Zhi is a maintainer, not a developer. Therefore, Zhou Zhi only understands the operating principles, functional modules, and general design ideas. It is impossible to write down all the specific source codes.

But it doesn't seem too difficult to form a development team and come up with these.

During this time, I have been dealing with computers a lot, and Zhou Zhi’s nature as a coder in his previous life is gradually awakening. The University of Hong Kong also has a Unicode-related research laboratory, and the underlying protocol code is in the minicomputer in the laboratory.

But many of the latest results require Li Leshan to get them from the Yale University laboratory server through the Internet.

Zhou Zhi brought a hard drive with him this time, which contained a series of large font software. It was just a demonstration version of the simplest principles. However, how to load it into the underlying protocol code had not been solved before and had to be written now.

After preparing everything, Zhou Zhi and Li Leshan sat side by side in order to improve efficiency.

Zhou Zhi was responsible for writing the relevant procedures, while Li Leshan was reviewing them.

Regarding some details and ideas, the two also need to discuss and introduce each other. After all, although the two have similar skills, they also have their own specialties. One is proficient in the protocol layer, and the other is proficient in the application layer.

Fortunately, both of them are experts. The HKU laboratory also has its own researcher, an old professor, and a large group of classmates. They are now watching in amazement as the two exchange a few words in extremely concise language, and then

This kid from the Mainland just clicked on the keyboard, and soon a program would be written and compiled successfully.

Of course, it is necessary to complete the normal operation of a font, even if it is just a demo version. There is only one song "Climbing the Stork Tower" in the font, and the development part is just to create a related program, just like fixing the foundation and the building on it together.

The "foundation stone" cannot be completed by a program, it must be a "program package".

Fortunately, these programs are not big. Because they are both proficient in each other, they cooperated very well and quickly completed the protocol association work of the demo version.

In fact, the work is almost done here, but for the convenience of demonstration, Zhou Zhi still installed an input method.

The input method used the five-stroke input method invented by Wang Yongming. At the Los Angeles Olympics that year, a reporter from the famous French newspaper Agence France-Presse discovered that a Chinese reporter had handwritten a press release and ridiculed it as news, claiming that there were seven people from all over the world at the Los Angeles Olympics.

There are more than a thousand reporters, but only Chinese reporters are still using medieval methods to report.

This is a tragic history. In addition to the serious derailment of the country's scientific and technological development and the world's advanced level, another important reason is the restrictions brought by hieroglyphics.

In order to solve this problem, the Chinese people have thought of many ways, such as the Pinyin shorthand method, which was popular across the country for a while. The third sister once taught herself this method and tried to use it to copy class notes.

In the era of typewriters, this was a dead end. The Chinese character code was not so easy to carry, and the machine itself was also bulky. Unlike alphabetic languages, the keys could be solidified directly on the machine.

It was not until we entered the computer age that we really had the opportunity to solve this problem.

Therefore, many people claim that the information age will bring about the demise of Chinese characters. This is really stupid or stupid. Many people do not understand typewriters, so they cannot see that computers can solve problems that typewriters cannot solve. Therefore, when it comes to printing Chinese characters, computers are not only not Chinese characters.

A sign of demise, on the contrary, is the dawn of a solution to this difficult problem.

Of course, even though I say this, I also experienced countless hardships.

In actual operation, it was the inspiration and creativity of countless geniuses and no regard for hard work that finally solved this problem.

After the invention of the Wangma Wubi input method, it was able to receive national strategic support and recognition such as the National Science and Technology Award, which fully illustrates its importance.

With the unicode protocol, demo font library, and input method, Chinese can be output on the computer.

HKU's minicomputer is also a UNIX system. There is no mouse or window interface. There is only a text input software that uses shortcut keys. It was developed by HKU itself and is called NEDIT.

But as long as it works, the text input interface without a mouse is extremely simple. Soon Zhou Zhou was able to type out the ASCII code loaded in the font library and "Climb the Stork Tower" on it.

The typed ASCII code is very strange. There is a horizontal line at the bottom of each character, indicating that these characters are no longer the ones in the previous UNIX system, but "new characters" taken from the new Unicode font library.

"It's done! The feasibility has been verified!" Li Leshan was so excited that he patted Zhou Zhi on the shoulder: "George, this is a moment that can be recorded in history! For the first time, we have loaded Chinese into the UNICODE font!"

"If twenty words count..." Zhou Zhi felt calm.

"Of course we have to count!" Li Leshan turned around and shouted to the watching crowd: "If you want to see a thousand miles away, go to a higher level! We have finally climbed to this level, right?!"
Chapter completed!