Riding the wind of rebirth

Chapter 1253 MiniCOS
This is Zhou Zhi's conspiracy. Japan and South Korea have no way to deal with it and have no other choice but to agree.

After the two people understood the situation of Clover Company, they felt that the two giant monsters of IBM and Microsoft were looking at the valuable things, so they could not easily obtain them. Looking at the rest, they felt that it was really useless.

However, they were not interested, but Zhou Zhi was somewhat enthusiastic: "I heard that the island country is working hard to transform the traditional camera industry?"

"What? Clover still wants to enter the digital camera industry?" There was a hint of sarcasm in Matsui Zuo's voice.

Zhou Zhi seemed not to have heard it: "Mr. Matsui, the image of the four-leaf clover itself is four petals, which means it can be divided or combined."

"Our goal is to create a universal operating system platform. This platform can not only be used as an operating system for computers, but can also be used as the underlying operating system for all information equipment in the future, including digital cameras, of course."

"As far as I know, several companies in our country have already started."

In fact, digital cameras have come a long way now.

From Bell Labs' promotion of the CCD photosensitive array in 1970, to the black-and-white image of a child and a dog being recorded on a cassette tape in 75, to the successful trial production of the first true digital camera by Kodak in 1991, a lot of progress has been made After 30 years of development, all technologies have matured and are about to usher in an explosive period.

Next is the qualitative change caused by the quantitative change of time. From now on, even if digital photography technology is completely finalized, it will continue to move towards the "involution road" of doubling the pixels, increasing the storage, increasing the standby time, and continuously reducing the cost. .

However, the technical architecture and intellectual property barriers have been basically determined from now on.

Such technical barriers are everywhere, making it difficult for latecomers to get over them only to see layers of high walls.

Zhou Zhi smiled and said, "I know you started early. From 1981, when Sony invented the first CCD electronic still camera, the Mavica, to 1988, when Fuji and Toshiba jointly developed the Fujixs still life camera using flash memory cards. It’s quite an achievement.”

"But what I want to say is that these cameras are still old models."

"Old model?" Jin Chunyi was surprised by Zhou Zhi's eloquent words, but now that he is short-tongued, he still asked for advice: "Please tell me, Mr. Zhou, what do you think is advanced."

Zhou Zhi said: "What I mean is that the digital camera has not yet undergone a real technological revolution. It is still a traditional camera, but it uses a photosensitive element to replace the viewfinder, a storage element to replace the film, and a data cable to connect to the computer. It replaces the washing room, that’s all.”

"The rest is basically mechanical control, or motor control."

"That's not all." Matsui Zuo shook his head: "Our point-and-shoot cameras now also have automatic metering, ranging, focusing, red-eye reduction, flash, and exposure functions. As far as I know, Fujifilm also has portrait, landscape, and many other functions. Night and other shooting modes.”

This is absolutely correct. In fact, the various functions of later generations of digital cameras have basically been covered by current point-and-shoot cameras. The control system of digital cameras is actually the design concept of the control system of point-and-shoot cameras transferred to digital cameras. .

Of course, the real situation will not be so simple, but the big conceptual deviation is not far away. The point-and-shoot camera is a transitional product in the "practical stage" of mankind, and its lifespan only lasts for ten years.

Ten years later, the world has become a world of digital cameras. Those camera manufacturers that did not have time to transform in time completely missed this feast and eventually became the only playthings in the hands of nostalgic people.

However, Zhou Zhi had a perfect breakthrough: "Our company is engaged in information technology, but in the final analysis, we are still producers of goods. We cannot generate profits until we deliver the goods to consumers." "We have our own name for the 'shelled' Linux you see in the training center, called COS."

"COS?" Matsui asked: "Chinese Operating System?"

"Of course not." Zhou Zhi smiled and said, "Our country's laws do not allow this. It is Clover Operating System."

"Clover is four-leaf clover, the English name of our company."

"Oh, that's a pretty name too."

"As I just said, it is difficult to monetize a product if it is not in the hands of consumers." Zhou Zhi continued: "In order to achieve this goal, we have made an abridged version of COS and used it as an industrial control-grade operating system platform. We named it MiniCOS."

"This MiniCOS, in our expectation, can become a benchmark operating platform for digital products. It can become the working matrix of various encoders and decoders. Load it with different decoding protocols, and it can become a CD player. machine, LD player, DVD player, MPEG player.”

"Similarly, for different hardware support, it can also support electronic dictionaries, game consoles, scanners, and digital cameras."

"You can think of it as a product between the X86 instruction set and Linux. It is designed only for small mobile devices."

"I know that there are only a few powerful companies in the island country, such as Sony, Fujifilm, and Toshiba, that have developed their own digital camera operating systems. However, I personally feel that developing independently is actually a huge waste of resources, and it is also excessive and ineffective. compete."

“Our solution is to leave this matter to us professionals, and everyone only needs a small licensing fee to obtain the right to use this platform, so that they can devote more energy to the product. to the research and development of core components.”

"This idea... does have some tricks up its sleeve." Matsui Zao was actually a little tempted by Zhou Zhi's words.

For those mobile devices mentioned by Zhou Zhi, the operating system is of course indispensable, but it is not the absolute core.

For example, the core technology of digital cameras is optical devices and image sensors that determine imaging accuracy.

Today's sensors have two modes: CCD and CMOS. The former is mid- to low-end, and the latter is high-end.

Regardless of the type, photodiodes are used to collect visible light and are finally output into original imaging pictures. The initial files are all in RAW format.

For the operating system of a digital camera, in addition to various fancy operating functions, its job is to faithfully store the most granular RAW format files. At most, it also has one job, which is to process them into rough browsing images. , returned to the viewfinder, so that the photographer can see the general picture effect. The real photo editing is done after exporting it from the digital camera to the computer.

Therefore, there is no need to imagine how high-end the operating system chip of a digital camera is. It is actually just a small platform that can load the functions of a point-and-shoot camera.

"Because our MiniCOS is supported by the concept of 'benchmark platform', it can provide maximum compatibility to various manufacturers." Zhou Zhi saw that Matsui Zou had come back to his senses and handed him a piece of pork belly wrapped with spring bamboo shoots. : "Mr. Matsui, do you understand what I mean?"

(End of this chapter)