Riding the wind of rebirth

"What is this?" Jiang Shuyi curiously took the small white square box and looked at the beautiful red dot in the center and the metal button with four four-leaf clover petals. She immediately understood the familiar symbols on it. Come over: "Walkman? Why is it like this?"

"Digital Walkman." Zhou Zhi plugged in the headphones into the headphone jack and pressed the power button with the red dot. The small LCD screen above lit up, and the directory tree in the memory stick appeared, all with songs with suffix names. name.

What Zhou Zhi poured into it were two albums by Faye Wong. The compression ratio was six times, and the sound was very clear and translucent.

In fact, there is no pressure at all on the device to analyze digital music. The listening effect comes more from the quality of the headphones.

"It's so beautiful." Jiang Shuyi looked at the small box: "It's what you said a few days ago. What's the purpose of this visit?"

"Yes, this is a Walkman that plays digital music." Zhou Zhi smiled: "You can copy the audio files on the computer to this machine. With it, you don't need any tapes or CDs."

"Then if there is no computer, wouldn't it be possible to use it?" Jiang Shuyi asked.

"Uh...well..." Zhou Zhi finally realized that this problem did exist.

Today's mainstream PCs are still 386 and 486, and the external drives on them are still five-inch large floppy disks and three-inch small floppy disks.

The optical drive was just invented the year before last, and it is not yet popular abroad, let alone in China.

The first notebook computer with an optical drive, IBM's ThinkPad 755cd, is said to not be launched until October this year, and the performance of the optical drive is very impressive, and it is a first-speed product.

Even for home computers, the hard drive storage capacity is very limited, generally 1G2G, and 4G home computers are already high-end, so the data space is very tight.

A CD is 700 megabits, so the question raised by Jiang Shuyi is very practical. If you use the format warehouse software to convert on your computer, then converting a CD will require about one gigabyte of space.

Therefore, the best way is to follow the path of computer stores in later generations, wait until optical drives become more popular, and directly buy music CDs in MP3 format, and then import them into the player.

Or just go to the computer game arcade, which was later the predecessor of the Internet cafe, where the latest music is usually downloaded from the computer workstation, and you can go there to copy it.

In any case, the current player is of almost no use to the children of ordinary Chinese families, and there is no place to copy songs.

"Then you should keep this for use." Jiang Shuyi said, "It's inconvenient for me to use."

"It won't be inconvenient." Zhou Zhi is also very smart: "You must also have English listening materials in your computer room. If you tell them to install the transcoding software and convert them all to MP3, they can hold twelve times more than now. They will definitely be happy with the information. Then you can copy it out and listen to it at any time."

"That's it..." Jiang Shuyi actually liked this gadget. After thinking about it for a while, she thought it was really good, and finally smiled: "Thank you for your thoughtfulness."

The two got on the bus and headed to Guangdong Road near the Bund.

The Guangdong Road Hushi Cultural Relics Store was formerly the Yiyuan Tea House, the central market where stalls were set up to sell antiques in the northern city before liberation. After liberation, the Shanghai antique system completed the public-private partnership in the entire industry, and the units specializing in and part-time antique business were reduced to antique markets, state-owned thrift stores, Xinlong, Gu Songji, Renli, Yixincheng, Zunyi Zhai, and Rongbao Nine restaurants, ancient book bookstores, etc. are basically concentrated here.

Later, it also experienced turmoil and decline, and was eventually renamed "Shanghai Cultural Relics Store". It was actually a rather large building in which six cultural relics export units approved by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage were established; eleven approved by the Municipal Cultural Relics Management Committee There are 7 cultural relics export agency units, 7 stores engaged in the auction of cultural relics or old handicrafts, 4 stores engaged in the mortgage business of cultural relics or old handicrafts, and 4 stores selling ancient coins domestically.

For a long time, this was a concentration camp for the works of famous "Shanghai School" painters in China, including Xu Beihong, Fu Baoshi, Pan Tianshou, He Xiangning, Dong Xiwen, Wang Shikuo, Li Keran, Wu Hufan, He Tianjian, Qi Baishi, Feng Zikai, Huang Binhong, Works by Shen Yinmo, Zhang Daqian, Deng Sanmu and many other famous artists are mainly hyped and change hands frequently.

There are still many shops here that are time-honored, but Zhou Zhi can tell at a glance that the operators of these so-called time-honored shops are no longer the old people or the inheritors of the old people.

At that time, most of the time-honored antique shops in Shanghai dealt with copper, porcelain, jade, and ivory.

The most powerful specialty categories are Da Yongqing in calligraphy and painting; Ruiwenzhai, Yiguzhai, and Chen Baoji in jade; Huangheji and Wang Yongji in ivory; Global Quanmin Society and Qilinquan Coin Society in coins; Wang Shaoquan and Tong Qingji in porcelain;

In terms of business scale, Jinguzhai is the largest; followed by Tongbaocheng, Jianyi, Ruizhen, and Yayede.

It's a pity that in the books introducing the antique industry that Zhou Zhi has read, these time-honored brands that once had great splendor and wonders have almost disappeared.

Zhou Zhi and Jiang Shuyi walked along and discovered a very interesting phenomenon, that is, the shops with time-honored names have a mixture of genuine and fake items, and the largest unit they can see is the Shanghai Cultural Relics Store. In addition to the signboards, there are Ancient Books Bookstore, Friendship Store, Mingyuan Trading Company, Arts and Crafts Research Institute, etc. In these shops with trendy names, the things sold are basically genuine and high-quality.

There are only two brands left here that sell genuine and high-quality products, and whose names are a little bit time-honored, one is called Duoyunxuan and the other is called Jiyuzhai.

The things in these two homes are really bad.

The rich are the uncles. This is the country’s most important window for exporting cultural relics, so countless good things are concentrated here, such as the treasure of Shudu Gongmei Zhenguan, ancient calligraphy and painting calligraphy of the same level as Qiu Ying’s "Wangchuan Picture", here Many shops have them, and they are hung on the wall behind the counter for everyone to see.

In fact, there are several large markets in Shanghai similar to Panjiayuan in the capital and Xianqiao in Shudu, but the fun of cultural entertainment is not just about picking up missing items.

Attending auctions, negotiating deals in antique shops, and hunting for goods at markets are different pleasures.

No matter how much money he had, it wouldn't be enough when he got here. Therefore, when Zhou Zhi came with Jiang Shuyi this time, he had no intention of spending money at all. He just wanted to broaden his horizons and see high-quality products.

Although Jiang Shuyi gradually became interested in these things due to Zhou Zhi, she has always been quite busy with her studies, so she doesn't have much energy to do these things.

However, occasionally she still finds time to practice line drawing when she has time. This is a hobby left over from when she helped her grandmother draw female drawings, and now it has become a small hobby for her to relax and relieve stress.

Today, it is no longer a mere layman.