Organize | Wang Qilong
Through "the present in history", the future can be seen from the past, and the future can be changed from the present.
Today is February 7, 2022, and on this day in 1834, the discoverer of the periodic table, Dmitry Mendeleev, was born. His famous book, Principles of Chemistry, which accompanied the periodic law of elements, was recognized as a standard work by the international chemical community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was published in eight editions, influencing generations of chemists. On February 7 in the history of computing, what other key events took place on this day that changed the world?
February 7, 1920: Wang An, the "computer king" of Chinese descent, was born
The first computer research institute on the mainland was established in 1957, which means that China's computer industry started 13 years later than in the United States; but can you imagine that in the 1950s, a Chinese man came to the United States alone, and the company he founded grew from a private workshop with an annual income of only $10,000 to a listed conglomerate with an annual income of more than $2 billion, and the "magnetic core memory" technology he invented monopolized in the computer industry for twenty years, and it was the first choice for computer main memory until the advent of integrated circuits... This Chinese man is Wang An. Bill Gates once said: "If Wang An can complete the second strategic transformation, there may not be Microsoft in the world, and I will also be a teacher somewhere, or a lawyer." ”
Fast back to February 7, 1920, in Shanghai during the Republic of China, a child named Wang An fell to the ground; Wang An spent his childhood in Kunshan, where his father taught English at a primary school on the outskirts of Shanghai and his mother was a housewife. In 1933, he was admitted to The Shanghai High School of Jiangsu Province. In 1936, he entered the Department of Electrical Engineering of National Jiaotong University with the first place in the entrance examination.
During World War II, this talented teenager led a team to hide in Guilin to study military radio and provide support for the War of Resistance Against Japan. After the war, Wang An, who had performed well in the war, joined the government's plan and was sent to the United States to study advanced technology; in order to support his living at Harvard University, Wang An decided to find a job, so he went to IBM.
In 1945, Wang An, who spoke a broken English, came to IBM for an interview, only to face the genius with racial discrimination and verbal humiliation. The interviewer said: "IBM is the best company in the United States, this is not for you, you better find a car repair shop to try." Since then, Wang An has hated IBM. In 1946, due to the outbreak of war in China again, Wang An lost the monthly allowance of $100, so he studied harder, completed his studies within three years, and received a doctorate in applied physics from Harvard University.
Source: Wikipedia
After graduating, Wang was recruited to the Harvard Computer Lab by Howard Aiken, the inventor of the world's first mainframe computer, MarkI. Aiken wanted to invent an all-electronic computer and ensure the portability of this new computer, so storage devices became key. Just when Aiken's team was at a loss, Wang An, who had just entered the laboratory, solved the problem theoretically. Wang An discovered that the principle of magnetic field vibration can be applied to computer storage systems, and invented magnetic core memory accordingly.
Subsequently, Wang An and Chinese classmates jointly invented the pulse transmission control device, which made the birth of magnetic core memory possible. Aiken admired Wang's talent and hoped that he would be able to turn him into a full-time researcher in the laboratory; however, Harvard's reduction in funding for computer research in 1951 made Wang realize that Harvard would soon abandon basic computer research in line with its policy of moving away from commercial applications. So Wang Anwan rejected Aiken, left Harvard, and went it alone. In June 1951, Wang an founded the "Wang Laboratories" in the South District of Boston, usa, and the first few years of the laboratory were difficult, and Wang An raised $50,000 in working capital by selling a one-third stake in the company to the machine tool manufacturer Warner & Swasey Company. The story of Wang An's computer officially began.
After setting up the company, Wang began methodically calling or writing letters to everyone in the universities, governments, and industry, who he thought might be interested in buying core memory. Wang began producing and selling his own magnetic core memory for $4 a unit; in the last six months of 1951, he made $3,253, a little more than the $2,700 he earned at Harvard. In the fall of 1952, Wang Began to gain the attention of major laboratories, and he was increasingly consulted to design specialized digital devices, thus developing his digital electronic devices. These contracts also gave him an understanding of the market and the fundamental elements of running a business.
In 1953, IBM approached Wang An, who was still in the entrepreneurial stage, with rich conditions, and invited him to become a corporate consultant. The fledgling Wang had no choice but to sign an agreement, agreeing to consult with IBM and granting them three years of product options to purchase his core memory; the resulting $100 a month revenue stabilized Wang's lab's finances. In 1955, when the core memory patent was officially released, IBM decided to buy Wang An's core memory patent; Wang An saw that IBM quoted a high price of $2.5 million and finally decided to sell the patent. IBM, however, backfired, denying its previous verbal agreement with Wang, claiming that "even half of $2.5 million is too high." In the end, Wang An sold the patent to IBM for $500,000 and merged with several Chinese classmates who were also unaccustomed to white style to form Wang An Computer Company.
Wang An Computer Company continued to develop, and in the past decade, it has introduced one invention after another, including paper hole recorders, automatic typewriters, radio typewriters and tape recognition machines. One of the most influential is the "Loxay" desktop computer (LOCI) released in 1964, "Losai" can quickly calculate complex mathematical formulas, and can be programmed; its size is small, simple to operate, more powerful, and quickly became the mainstream at that time, becoming a need for small computer enterprises. Driven by "Lo Sai", Wang An Computer's revenue soared, from $1 million in sales in 1964 to $6.9 million in 1967.
Image source: CSDN Downloaded from The Oriental IC
Also in 1967, due to the excessive cost of invention and creation in the past decade, Wang An Computer Company ushered in a debt crisis. Although Wang An liked to take his own risk and take full control, he decided to take the company public and raise funds to pay off his short-term debts; in the summer of 1967, Wang An Computer Company went public, and the issue price of the stock was initially $12.5, and by the close of the day, it had risen to a staggering $40.50, and overnight, Wang An's net worth soared by $50 million, the name of the Chinese shocked Wall Street. By 1970, the company had sales of $27 million and 1,400 employees. Wang An had already made plans for revenge on IBM, and at that time, IBM's market value was more than three hundred times that of Wang An's computer.
In 1976, Wang's computer launched the Word Processing System, creating the word WPS. At that time, American white-collar workers needed such a new type of office equipment, and this magical machine even spread to the White House, becoming the hottest technology product of the computer, and its unprecedented concept of word processing systems has always affected today's computer world. Wang An became famous through WPS and officially declared war on IBM; in the 1980s, Wang An computer reached its peak, and Wang An became the richest Chinese American and at one point the fifth richest man in the United States. In 1986, he returned to his homeland, the leaders received him and congratulated him, in November of this year, Wang An retired due to physical problems; Wang An has always maintained a Chinese style and attitude to life, disdainful of the American management system, and he brought this sentiment to retirement, prompting the demise of Wang An Computer Company.
In 1986, when Wang wanted to retire from running his own company, he distrusted the company's American elite and insisted in handing control of the company to his son, Wang Lie. The company's tough times followed, with a large number of employees resigning, and in 1989, Wang Was finally forced to dismiss his son. On March 24, 1990, Wang died of esophageal cancer at Massachusetts General Hospital at the age of 70. After Wang An's death, Wang An Computer Company quickly disintegrated, and a generation of legends ended; in fact, Wang An's son was not all the reason for the demise of Wang An's computer, at that time, Apple was born, Microsoft's Bill Gates was also fully prepared, and Wang An did not think that personal computers would become the mainstream in the future, always developing the mainframe industry. Do you think the failure of Wang An's computer is inevitable? What is the real reason for the disintegration of Wang An's computer? Feel free to vote in this issue and share your insights in the comments section.
Source: Wikipedia, Baidu Encyclopedia
February 7, 1941: Leslie Lamport, developer of laTeX, a file typesetting system, is born
Leslie B. Lamport was born on February 7, 1941, an American computer scientist known for his pioneering work on distributed systems, the original developer of the document typesetting system LaTeX and the author of the first manual, for which he won the 2013 Turing Award; These contributions improve the correctness, performance, and reliability of computer systems.
Lampot was born in New York in 1941 as the son of European immigrants. After receiving his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Landport went to Brandeis University to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics and taught mathematics at Marlboro College, a small liberal arts school in Vermont. After that, he worked part-time at the Massachusetts Computer Association, doing ILLIAC design. With his Ph.D. in 1972, Lamper continued his studies at ILLIAC; he eventually showed that the relative order in the distributed system was related to his observer.
Lampot's research contributions laid the foundation for distributed systems theory, and Lamper is also known for his work on temporal logic when he discovered the temporal logic of action (TLA). He received the 2013 Turing Award in 2014 for his "fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems, particularly the invention of concepts such as causality and logical clocking, security and activity, replication state machines, and sequential consistency."
February 7, 1956: Mark McCahill, who invented the term "surf the Internet," is born
Did you ever think "surfing the internet" was a Chinese word? In fact, "surfing the Internet" is a clever translation of the English word "Surfing the Internet", in which the word "Surfing" refers to "surfing"; and the person who invented "surfing the Internet" was Mark Perry McCahill, an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. Born on February 7, 1956, McCahill has developed and popularized many Internet technologies since the late 1980s, including the Gopher protocol, uniform resource locator (URL), and POPmail.
In 1979, McCahill earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Minnesota, spent a year doing analytical environmental chemistry, and then joined the University of Minnesota Computer Center as a programmer. In the late 1980s, McCahill led a team at the University of Minnesota to develop POPmail, one of the first popular Internet email clients. Around the same time as POPmail was developed, Steve Dorner of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed Eudora, and the user interface conventions discovered in these early efforts are still used in modern email clients. Subsequently, in collaboration with other pioneers such as Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Anderson, Alan Emtage, and Peter J. Deutsch (founder of Archie) and Jon Postel, McCahill was involved in the creation and compilation of the URL standard.
In April 2007, McCahill left the University of Minnesota to join Duke University's Office of Information Technology as an architect for 3-D learning and collaboration systems, and has been working on virtual worlds ever since. McCahill is said to have coined or popularized the term "surfing the Internet." However, before McCarthal first used the phrase in February 1992, the analogy was also used in the October 1991 comic book The Adventures of The Internet Captain and the CSF Boy, published by one of the early Internet service providers.
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