Countercurrent 1982

Chapter 2001 Instant Messaging Software
After leaving the space agency, Duan Yun came to the branch where his sister was located that afternoon.

Duan Fang was very happy to see her brother also coming, and led her brother to visit the company's newly leased office floor, and introduced the development and research progress of the branch during the recent period.

In fact, when Duan Yun set up a branch in BJ, his original intention was to let his younger sister who married into BJ continue to work in his company. After all, her younger sister Duan Fang was the earliest young technical backbone of the company, and both in terms of technology and ability , are very outstanding, and she also loves this job very much, so starting a company in BJ, on the one hand, allows her to continue to do the job she likes in BJ, and on the other hand, it is because of her own company to make some contributions, but I didn't intend to make the BJ branch bigger, just treat it as an office.

However, in the past two years, especially in the past year, the BJ branch of Tianyin Group has developed very rapidly. From the beginning, there were only dozens of technical and management personnel in an office building on the first floor, and now it has expanded to a leased office in Haiding District. The five-story office building of the building has 1300 employees, which has surpassed the Hong Kong branch. It can be said that Tianyin Group is the largest electronic product research and development center besides the Shenzhen headquarters.

"Since last year, we have recruited nearly 700 fresh graduates here, and there are more than 200 people who have jumped from other technology companies in BJ." Sitting in the office area of ​​the company, Duan Fang pointed to the office area The staff who were busy said to Duan Yun: "Now the recruitment threshold of our branch has also been raised a lot. In the past, as long as fresh graduates, no matter whether they are key universities or non-key universities, regardless of their majors, as long as they have You can enter with a diploma, but now you must be a key university, and you must have a professional counterpart. I used to have too little management experience in the personnel department, and now I feel that the company is really on the right track..."

"Just take your time, not to mention that you have done a good job in the past two years." Duan Yun smiled slightly, and then said: "Do you have any new research and development plans recently?"

"I have already reported to the company before, and I have also told you that the research and development tasks of products are mainly aimed at the upgrade and modification of domestic computers and DVDs, as well as the maintenance and upgrade of domestic systems. Currently, BJ has dozens of Government departments have already used the new system developed by our company, and we plan to optimize this system in the next step, and add some software with new functions according to the requirements of various users." Duan Fang said.

"BJ's government department is the first batch of domestic users to use the domestic operating system, and the department's level is very high. They have a lot of requirements for the new system. If this system can be successful in BJ, it means that we The company's domestic system promotion plan has been more than half successful." Duan Yun glanced at his younger sister, and then said: "As for the software development you mentioned, which aspect is currently in demand from customers?"

"It's mainly about the local area network. Because the popularity of computers in various departments of BJ is relatively high now, computers have become the standard equipment for many department heads. There are more needs for communicating documents or exchanging information between them. They are all preparing to develop a series of LAN communication software based on our company's new system platform. In addition to the original text transmission software, we are currently developing communication software that can smoothly transmit pictures, audio, and video..."

"A communication software that can transmit pictures, audio and video smoothly?" Duan Yun was stunned when he heard this, and then asked repeatedly: "What is the current development progress of this software?"

A long time ago, Duan Yun thought of developing a software instant messaging system, which is similar to the instant messaging software of QQ and WeChat in later generations, so as to take the lead in the coming Internet era.

But in fact, it is not difficult to simply write a set of communication software with text functions. In fact, the history of instant messaging can be traced back to 1960 at the earliest.

Before 1960, computers were still in the batch processing era. The so-called batch processing refers to loading user programs and data into cassettes or tapes in advance, and reading them in a certain order by the computer, so that these programs and data to be executed by the user A method that can be processed in batches.

With the development of the Internet, people urgently need an online chat system to solve some problems encountered in work.

In 1973, Doug Brown and David R. Woolley created Talkomatic, the world's first instant messaging system, on the Plato system at the University of Illinois.

Talkomatic provides six channels, and each channel allows up to five users to chat online. Later, this system was applied to PLATO Notes, the world's first online forum. It was not until the 80s that this forum gradually disappeared from people's minds. in view.

The way Talkomatic sends information is different from instant messaging software such as QQ and WeChat.When we use WeChat to communicate, we need to type out the text message first, and then click the "send" button, so that the other party can see the message.But Talkomatic is real-time, every time the sender types a word, the receiver can receive it immediately.

With the development of the Internet, instant messaging software began to appear.Among them, ICQ, developed by three Israeli youths in 1996, is the most famous. It is the world's first instant messaging software.

Once ICQ was launched, it became the instant messaging software with the largest number of users in the world in just 6 months. Even in Asia, where the Internet was relatively underdeveloped at that time, the market share exceeded 70%.

In 1998, the number of ICQ users reached 1200 million, and it was acquired by AOL for US$2.87 million.Almost at the same time, Ma Huateng, who was in China, saw the huge commercial value of instant messaging, and changed the main business of establishing an online paging system for paging stations to developing an instant messaging tool - OICQ.

Just when OICQ was sweeping the Chinese instant messaging market, America Online, the parent company of ICQ, sued Tencent for infringement, and only then did the famous Tencent QQ come into being.

But it is not easy to develop a set of instant messaging software with voice and video in this era, because in this era, computer hardware and other related video and audio software are not mature, especially the video software and audio software are too large. It is simply impossible to complete the transfer.

In addition, computers in the early 90s did not have video functions, only some small animations.

Until about 95, there were videos in AVI format, but the picture was very small, otherwise it would be very stuck.

Therefore, in this era, it is very difficult to transmit video and audio in a local area. However, once a breakthrough is made in this technology, it will have very huge commercial value.

(End of this chapter)