Video Game Empire

The place where Li Xuan and Hermann Hauser met was in the office of the Ikon company. Unlike Currie, who is slightly plump, Hauser is a handsome British gentleman. He showed Li Xuan a tour of his company with great enthusiasm.

In fact, Aikang company has nothing to visit, just a few offices. Aikang's computer production is outsourced to cooperative factories, and the real core of the company is more than a dozen R&D personnel. In Haozer's general manager's office, there is a row of display cabinets against the wall, which display all the real signal computers developed by Aikang since its establishment.

"The first computer developed by our company is called System1, and this is the first prototype I made myself!" Hauser smiled and pointed to a small and exquisite computer in the display window, his tone full of pride.

Well, being small and exquisite is just Li Xuan's praise. This is actually an 8-bit microcomputer that is too rudimentary to be rudimentary. The whole machine is composed of two exposed boards, one board includes LED display, keyboard and tape interface, and the other board includes CPU and other computer components.

Although it doesn't look beautiful at all, it is cheap. When it went on sale at the beginning of last year, Ikon confirmed the price of 65 pounds in bulk and only 75 pounds in assembled products. Relying on the low price, as soon as this System1 was unveiled, it was sought after by many amateur computer enthusiasts, and Ikon Company grabbed the first pot of gold.

Ikon may be the first company in the UK to realize computer intranet. After Andy Hopper joined Ikon, he immediately started to build a special local area network for the company, named it.

Hopper is a very interesting person. When Li Xuan had a pleasant conversation with Hauser, he walked in wearing a flying suit of the British Royal Air Force during World War II. He's a flying enthusiast and has just returned to the company after taking a pilot training course in Helicopter aircraft.

Hopper's conversation was very humorous. He personally demonstrated to Li Xuan various functions of the network he designed for Aikang. The company's intranet undoubtedly makes the communication between developers more convenient and can effectively improve work efficiency.

Li Xuan and Hopper exchanged many topics about local area networks, such as two very popular non-public network standards in the industry, Token Ring and the well-known Ethernet technology in later generations.

"The reason why I invented the CambridgeRing network system when I was a Ph.D. was actually influenced by Mr. Metcalf. His paper "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching Technology for Local Computer Networks" published in 1976 , gave me a lot of inspiration!" Hopper talked about why he would develop a local area network.

"Do you know the reason why Hauser dug me into Ikon?"

Hopper pointed to his friend and asked Li Xuandao. Li Xuan shook his head in cooperation.

"At first, I thought he was interested in my technology, so he was very happy and came to work at Aikang. I didn't expect that after he recruited me to the company, he asked me to be a sales manager!"

Hopper looked at Hauser with deliberate contempt. "The first thing this guy asked me to do was go to the computer lab in Cambridge and sell System1 to my mentors and colleagues! Hey, you know how embarrassing I was. It's obviously such a simple thing, and you have to brazenly brag about how excellent it is!"

Li Xuan and the two communicated very happily.

Ikon is a very young and dynamic company. Among the company's three shareholders, Hauser, the eldest, is only 32 years old, and Currie and Hopper are only 27 years old. Most of the company's employees, including its three shareholders, are Cambridge University alumni. Hopper was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory before joining Icon.

After Currie's attitude began to soften, Dongfang Electronics' acquisition of Aikang officially started. Li Xuan specially invited Standard Chartered Bank as the financial advisor for this merger. After several rounds of heated negotiations between the two parties, Dongfang Electronics finally bought the computer company, which had just been established for a year and a half, with an offer of 2.15 million pounds.

The first thing Dongfang Electronics did after the acquisition was naturally to appease the employees. Fortunately, Aikang's scale is not large, even if Corporal Li Xuanlixian had a deep discussion with each employee in person, it didn't take much time. Coupled with the 10% salary increase policy, the people who were originally floating within Aikang quickly stabilized.

Of all the R&D engineers, Li Xuan is undoubtedly most concerned about Steve Ferber and Sophie Wilson. These two are the real designers of the ARM architecture, but now Li Xuan has taken the lead. He naturally wanted to persuade these two great people to rejoin the development of the ERM architecture of Dongfang Electronics.

Sophie Wilson is a somewhat special lady, well, she's actually a transgender. Li Xuan also worked hard to speed up the research and development of the ERM architecture. Although he felt a little strange in his heart, he communicated amiably with each other as if nothing had happened.

The new company must have a new look. After being acquired by Dongfang Electronics, Aikang will not continue to squeeze into the second-floor attic of the store along the street, but will find a new office address in Cambridge Town. The new Aikang company will focus on the research and development of personal computers, and at the same time, Dongfang Electronics will set up a technology research and development center in Cambridge, focusing on the research and development of ERM architecture, local area network technology and other fields.

The Atom computer will continue to go on sale, and Ikon will develop a new personal computer based on the Atom. Because the ERM architecture of Dongfang Electronics directly skips 16 bits, it is a 32-bit instruction set architecture.

After the development of ERM is mature, Dongfang Electronics will directly start the 32-bit personal computer development plan. But in order to make up for the gap between 8-bit computers and 32-bit computers, Aikang's next R&D plan will have a compromise.

Develop an 8-bit computer with great scalability to fill the gap in the company's 16-bit computer. The new PC still uses the 6502 processor as the main CPU, but will add a dedicated port for expanding a second processor. The main CPU performs IO work, and other processing tasks are entrusted to the extended CPU~www.readwn.com~ At the same time, Dongfang Electronics Co., Ltd. began to communicate with the BBC Broadcasting Corporation, hoping to cooperate in computer sales. In the past life, it was because of the broadcast of the documentary "Powerful Microprocessing" that the BBC received a large number of calls from viewers to inquire about personal computers.

This gave the top management of the BBC company the original intention of selling a suitable computer equipment to domestic PC enthusiasts. Initially, the BBC company set a sales target of 10,000 or 20,000 units for this computer, so it chose Ikon, a little-known small company, as a partner. But no one could have guessed that the BBCMicro personal computer specially customized by Ikon Company sold 1.5 million units throughout the 1980s.

Now that Li Xuan knows this story, he will not give up this easy opportunity. Now that the BBC's documentary has just started broadcasting, and its influence has not spread, Dongfang Electronics is the first to come to the door to discuss cooperation.

After Dongfang Electronics signed a series of advertising contracts with the BBC and gave the BBC a certain percentage of sales, the two parties quickly reached an agreement. Dongfang Electronics will launch a special personal computer with reasonable configuration and low price within half a year, and BBC will fully cooperate with the promotion of this new personal computer in the UK.

Of course, the name of the new computer can no longer be BBCMicro, and Dongfang Electronics will naturally not give up such a good opportunity to promote its own brand. The name of the new computer will definitely start with Acorn (Ikon), Acorn-Best is a good name.

PS: Keith vomited blood for an update, continue to ask for a recommendation ticket~www.readwn.com~ Welcome to reading, the latest, fastest and most popular serial works are all at~www.readwn.com~. ;