Back to the Republic of China to be a editor

The staff of the computer institute struggled to lift the monitor out of the wooden box and put it on the table.

The 14-inch screen is equipped with a huge and thick case, which is also impossible-there are too many built-in components, and these components cannot be saved for the time being, unless the corresponding function is released in a few years. - Digital chip.

"Help me push the table over..."

The laboratory of the Computer Institute has prepared a modified T51.It is already hard to describe what this T51 looks like: the three 3-segment screens on the top of the cabinet are useless, so they were simply removed, and two thick cables were connected from the cabinet to an iron box, and the iron box extended thick Cable, Tang Hua connected the thick cable to the monitor.

"Old Lie, does this computer really need to be overclocked?" Tang Hua asked before turning it on.

Lebedev: "I have tried many times on many T51s. The computer's operating frequency has no problem from 20K Hz to 40K. There has never been a fatal failure."

Tang Hua himself hadn't played overclocking before in Beijing, so now he can only choose to trust Lao Lie...

Turn on the 14-inch monitor first, the screen will flash, and then return to the normal black screen after a few seconds.Then open the modified T51.The overclocked T51 didn't blow up.

A line of greenish-white numbers appears on the top of the display.

Then comes the second line.

Startup complete.

When the T51 computer is turned on, two lines of words are displayed on the segment code screen in this way, indicating that the computer has been started and the status is displayed.

Tang Hua dragged Lebedev over to let him have a try—this version of the operating system was modified by him.

Lebedev tried typing a few letters and a series of numbers on the Russian keyboard.

The displayed characters should also be displayed on the monitor screen should Lebedev's input be displayed.Now it is not a weird 16-segment code screen letter, but a standard printed letter.

Lebedev continued to type, calling a calculation program already in the memory to run, and input parameters.

The display also displayed the invoked command, and then the output of the display stopped for half a minute. After the program calculated the result, a line of words appeared on the display to display the calculation result.

"It's really more convenient ... I mean, you can display many lines on the screen at the same time, and you don't have to press the up and down arrows frequently to view previous records." Lebedev said.

"Is this what you did when you developed a new version of the operating system on the segment code screen?" Tang Hua said with a smile, "That was really hard work."

When it was Tang Hua's turn to try out the new monitor, he didn't call the calculation program, but tried text input. He clicked on the keyboard and typed a letter with hundreds of letters.Two spaces at the beginning of each paragraph, upper and lower case letters, punctuation marks...

"Then I'm going to print." Tang Hua checked that the dot matrix printer was connected, and printed out the entered content.

Back in this era, Tang Hua has been working hard to make the daily necessities around him comparable or similar to the previous ones.Now, at least on the computer side, it's more like...

Chapter 197, PJX-1 to be exported

In the last month of 1951, Remington Rand on the other side of the ocean made a fortune.

In 1950, Eckert Jr. and John Mauchly, members of the invention team of the first generation computer ENIAC, established a company and designed a commercial computer solution.The visionary Remington Rand Corporation took a fancy to this scheme, bought the computer scheme together with their small company, and promoted the blueprint of this computer named UNIVAC in early 1951. When I saw the real machine, I ordered one. In June 1, Remington Rand turned the "cake" into reality and created a prototype of UNIVAC-1951. In November 6, the first UNIVAC-1 was finally commissioned and accepted by the customer, the US Census Bureau.

After the delivery of the first UNIVAC-1, word of mouth spread wildly among U.S. government and military agencies about this exceptionally useful commercial computer, and Remington Rand felt that money was falling from the sky.When new orders came in, one of the first things Remington Rand did was raise prices.

The UNIVAC-1 ordered by the US Census Bureau has a price tag of $15.

In December 1951, the U.S. Air Force came to the door to order a UNIVAC to be placed in the Pentagon.The U.S. Army Map Service came to the door and wanted a UNIVAC.

The president of Remington Rand looked at the check for $159000: "Dear sir, the current price of the UNIVAC computer is not this amount."

……

The second and third units sold by Remington Rand are expected to be sold in 1952. The price of the UNIVAC computer delivered in 40 reached 1 US dollars. Buy one get one free, buy a UNIVAC-1911 and get a Remington Rand One M1A[-] pistol produced by German company.

The company's executives also made plans to increase the price to $100 million a piece at a time after the improved tape storage system is in place.

This UNIVAC-1 uses vacuum tubes, the number is 5200, which is only about one-third of ENIAC-because the users targeted by UNIVAC do not use it for scientific calculations.

It covers an area of ​​35.5 square meters, weighs 7.6 tons, and consumes 125 kilowatts of power.

Memory mercury delay tube, the memory size is 1K bytes, but the system of this computer has 12 binary numbers per byte, so it is... 12Kbit.The biggest selling point is the 224K tape storage unit, which is the core value of this commercial computer.

Tang Hua had seen Remington Rand's computer advertisements in English newspapers a few months earlier, and he also knew that the UNIVAC series machines were blatantly raising prices wildly.He dared to sell this kind of machine for 40 US dollars, and it is said that the price will be raised to 100 million US dollars! One million dollars is five million rubles.

Bro, do you want to see my T51?

Don't even think about it, it's at war with the United States.Tang Hua could only silently envy and hate on the other side of the ocean.

……

Apart from Remington Rand, Tang Hua was still thinking about IBM.

In the United States at this time, Remington Rand was not the only one developing commercial computers.

Perhaps seeing the popularity of UNIVAC-1, in 1951, IBM also tried to design its own IBM-701 defense computer and IBM-702 commercial computer.It is still a computer with vacuum tubes, and still has a pleasant weight of 9.3 tons, but it is slightly faster than UNIVAC when performing scientific calculations.As for the price... In 1952, after the IBM-701 was produced, IBM pioneered the computer rental model. When poor users who couldn’t afford a computer could buy a computer, they could rent it for $12000 a month, but this is not an unlimited monthly subscription, but It is to limit the total usage time to 40 hours, which is $300 per hour.If 40 hours are not enough, the rent for additional clocks will increase rather than decrease. For example, if the same user wants to use 80 hours a month, it will not be 24000 US dollars but 32000 US dollars - the total rent for the last 40 hours is 20000 Dollar.

Tang Hua, who was typing and programming in front of the T51 monitor version computer, became angry when he thought that there were opportunities to make a fortune everywhere in the United States.

……

Beijing, Nankou.

Shtemenko sent a telegram, and Vasily Ivanovich Kazakov, First Deputy Commander of Soviet Artillery, immediately organized a delegation.It took Kazakov only 5 days from forming a team to flying to Beijing. In Beijing, he met with the delegation of Shtemenko, and a group of people drove a dozen jeeps straight to the south entrance.

"Comrade Kazakov, do you have computers in your artillery headquarters?" asked Shtemenko.

"No. But after receiving your telegram, I took the time to go to Moscow University to watch the operation of the computer." Kazakov replied.

Shtemenko: "That is considered to have been in contact with computers. We will be at the South Gate in a while, and we will see a computer designed by Chinese comrades for field artillery."

Kazakov: "Computers for field artillery? That would be attractive. But where do they install the computers? 4X2 trucks or 6X4 trucks? ... If the computer is used in field artillery, it must not only be portable and mobility, and maybe some basic protection design, I don’t know whether to make the truck’s shell into a light armor plate, or strengthen the computer’s shell?”

Shtemenko glanced at Kazakov without further explanation.

The First Artillery Division is a well-deserved "big brother" in the artillery sequence of the People's Liberation Army. It was formerly the Artillery Column of the Northeast Field Army. On the battlefield to resist US aggression and aid Korea, the First Artillery Division participated in the first to fifth battles. The fifth battle ended Later, he was rotated from North Korea and accepted the replacement of Soviet-style artillery and the replacement of field artillery computers.

Today, the Artillery Division has no training or exercises. In the camp of the First Artillery Division at Nankou, what Kazakov saw was similar to that of the Soviet Army’s own Artillery Division: neatly lined up Soviet-made trucks and tractors, in the warehouse 152mm or 122mm howitzers, well-dressed soldiers lined up to and fro, and many soldiers were cleaning and maintaining underground or next to the artillery.

In order to welcome the Soviet delegation to visit again, the First Artillery Division pulled out three artillery companies and set them up on the shooting range near the camp, and the tent of the battalion artillery command post was also set up.In the cold wind, Su Jin, Kazakov and the Artillery Command staff walked into the tent.

"The PJX-1 artillery computer is a small transistor digital computer with a total weight of 85 kg. It can be operated on a vehicle or moved from the vehicle to the shelter of the artillery command post. When it is moved manually, the PJX-1 can be disassembled into The two box-type divisions are carrying." The artillery battalion commander stood up and saluted, and recited the performance introduction of PJX-1 according to the textbook he learned.

Kazakov's eyes lit up, and he stepped forward to lift one of the boxes of the PJX-1 computer.After weighing the weight, Kazakov, who had worked in the 203mm howitzer regiment, felt that he could give it a try... Stretched out his left hand and lifted the other box of PJX-1...

"Davarish, can you assemble the computer and demonstrate it to us now?"

The battalion commander saluted, turned around and together with the staff, lifted the two boxes onto the table and combined them together, and opened the control and display panel of PJX-1.

"The numeric keyboard here is the place to enter the original parameters that need to be calculated when the artillery shoots."

"The buttons here represent weather, altitude, air pressure, temperature, humidity, and bomb type. The computer has been preset to calculate the parameters of the 152mm howitzer. The bomb type is selected as high-explosive grenade."