wild 1995

Chapter 96 Format
Di Ye didn't go to the R&D team in the afternoon, not because he was going out for a while, but because he wanted to read the code himself.

Yuncheng is located in the inland area, and the news is blocked. Before Di Ye disappeared, he had used very little software and read codes. As a result, Xiaohonghua didn't have much knowledge of programming in the 90s. The programs he wrote always had mistakes of one kind or another, so now he needs to make up lessons.

Fortunately, Xiaohonghua has a strong ability to receive and analyze information. As long as no error is reported, Di Ye will use himself as a humanoid camera, just glance at the screen without looking closely. If an error is reported, stop and check carefully.

Just tossing around like this for an afternoon, Di Ye looked at the source code of more than 100 software in total, and didn't stop until dusk and when he was hungry.

In order to test the effect of looking at the code, before going out for dinner, Di Ye asked Xiaohonghua to rewrite HTTPd in ​​C language while packing up his belongings.

"Need to refer to Nginx?"

"No, Nginx will come out later when the C10K problem needs to be solved. Now just optimize HTTPd to make it more stable and easier to use."

Nginx is a lightweight web server software that only appeared in 2004. It has better performance than Apache and is more popular in the market. However, Di Ye does not want to use it for the time being, because the website in 1995 was very rudimentary, and there were not many netizens. There was no C10K problem, and the original version of HTTPd was enough.

In the 90s, all servers were based on the process/thread model. For each TCP connection, a process or thread needs to be allocated. If 1 clients connect at the same time, 1 will be created, which will occupy a lot of hardware resources and cause the operating system to crash. This phenomenon is called the C1K problem.

The C10K issue is very important in the 21st century, but it was not important in 1995, because the web pages were all static. Even a star-level website like Yahoo has only 200-[-] online users at the same time, so don't consider this issue for the time being.

Furthermore, the market may not appreciate all the good things that are too advanced.

Di Ye has a profound lesson in this regard. When he wrote those open source articles, he discussed many feasible business models in the future with great enthusiasm and enthusiasm, but he was ridiculed in the end. It was not as effective as a sentence of "show your code". So now he has changed his strategy and adopted a follow-up strategy, relying on micro-innovation to win.

"Master, it has been written."

The progress of Xiaohonghua is obvious. It took only a few seconds to rewrite HTTPd. Not only did it not make any mistakes this time, but it also made a PPT document very intimately, comparing the optimized version with the original version, proving that it is leading in stability, ease of use and performance.

Di Ye was very satisfied with the effect, and decided to knock out the optimized version at night, so after eating in the hotel restaurant, he took a taxi to the R&D team.

Since the various functional modules in the early days of the Internet were relatively simple, HTTPd, like the Mosic browser, did not have a lot of source code. Di Ye explained while typing on the keyboard, and it only took more than 3 hours to get it done, which once again drove the team members collectively crazy.

"Mr. Hua, you still let people live, we just understood the original version!"

"It's okay to understand the original version. In the future, this web server software will be maintained by you... Come, come, give it a name."

Naming the software is currently the only project that the R&D team has a sense of participation in, so the enthusiasm is high, and it is discussed and voted. Finally, the optimized version of HTTPd is named "Tengyun", which is paired with Athlon, because the cloud follows the dragon, and the wind follows the tiger.

This name is a bit close to the future Penguin Cloud, which aroused Di Ye's thoughts, so he went to the balcony, called Xu Chenye with his mobile phone, and asked, "Brother Xu, when will you return to Pengcheng?"

Xu Chenye is in the second year of graduate school, and there are many things to do in school. He went back to Jinling two days ago and said, "I will go back in the afternoon the day after tomorrow."

"The day after tomorrow is Saturday. You can ask Zhang Zhidong if he is free. If he is free, ask him to come over from South China University of Technology and then call Ma Huazhuan. Let's get together."

"Okay, I'll arrange it."

Di Ye’s butterfly wings are not fluttering too much now, but it has already affected several entrepreneurial veterans of Penguin. For example, Xu Chenye was stimulated by him to study for a Ph. D. He planned to do a Ph. D. after graduating from a master’s degree, instead of going back to work at the Pengcheng Telecom Data Communication Bureau.

This change made Di Ye a little tangled. He went to Ma Huazhuan not to hug his thigh, but because he didn't know anyone in Beijing and Pujiang. If he wanted to get in touch with Cfido and the Internet, he had to ask this celebrity for help.

Di Ye likes to do some challenging things and is not interested in social software, so he doesn’t want to change the fate of Penguin entrepreneurs. After all, history has proved that Ma Huaquan and Xu Chenye’s programming talents are far inferior to those in business, so they plan to have a dinner party and chat with them.

"Mr. Hua, is Tengyun uploaded to Xiaohonghua's official website, or to Athlon's official website?"

"Athlon."

Di Ye turned around and replied, then raised his mobile phone and made another call, this time to Professor Luo of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, asking about the download status of several software on the official website of the Xiaohonghua Open Source Foundation.

"Today, the downloads of DY-ZIP and WebP have exceeded 1000. I have asked students, and they all think it is good, especially WebP, which is very convenient to use."

"Okay, thank you, Professor Luo."

There are 3 softwares on the official website of the Little Red Flower Open Source Foundation. One is DY-ZIP written by Di Ye first, one is Oleander written by Di Ye before he went to Hong Kong, and the other is a software that Di Ye wrote during the winter vacation but has not been released. It is called WebP image editing software.

On the fourth day of the first lunar month, Di Ye carried a box of Maotai to pay New Year greetings to Liu Shaosong, which aroused Fu Chuanyi's curiosity. Afterwards, he found a note in his study with the words "JPEG" and "GIF". At that time, Di Ye had already started to tinker with WebP.

WebP is an open source image format released by Google in 2010. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as dynamic images. It has the advantages of high compression ratio and support for transparent channels. Based on this, Di Ye wrote a special image editing software that can convert BMP, JPEG, GIF and other formats into WebP. He intends to use it as a bargaining chip and try to contact Netscape.

The popularity of JPEG and GIF on the Internet is due to Netscape. Mosic is the first browser to support JPEG images, and Netscape 2.0 is the first browser to support GIF images. While supporting it, it also added a very important repeat playback function to GIF images.

However, both image formats were charged in 1995.

The JPEG patent is in the hands of a company called Forgent Networks. During the entire patent validity period, this company sued more than 60 Internet companies and more than 30 PC manufacturers, and collected more than 1 million U.S. dollars in patent fees.

GIF patents are in the hands of two companies, Unisys and CompuServe, and their fees are even more brutal. Even non-commercial websites and private websites have to pay more than $5000 in licensing fees.

Netizens suffered greatly due to the ruthlessness of wool and wool, and even launched a campaign to boycott it. In order to replace GIF, W3C came up with the MNG format in 1996. Unfortunately, the MNG encoding was so bad that browser manufacturers were unwilling to support it. In the end, nothing happened, leaving only a lossless compression image format PNG as a legacy.

Since Netscape was the source of the Internet bubble in the late 90s, Di Ye is not going to compete with it in terms of browser technology for the time being, so as not to hit too hard and affect the grand occasion when it goes public. Instead, it plans to use WebP, a content format, to try cooperation with Netscape. If the cooperation is successful, it will continue to promote the next content format, such as music.

As for the music format, Di Ye planned it earlier, and talked about it with Shi Yucheng before the Spring Festival, but he never found the right time to come up with it.

"Di Ye, have you written a reply to that American company?"

"Not yet, I'm going to write now."

(End of this chapter)