Ni Guangnan
In the early 1980s, microcomputer technology was just introduced to China. However, due to the lack of Chinese character processing capabilities, its application scope was greatly reduced. At this time, the country's computer work Researchers are doing various development and research for Chinese character processing, and new hardware and software technologies such as Chinese character input, display, printing, and font libraries are constantly being introduced.
As the most authoritative computing technology research institution in China, the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, there are also many scientific and technical personnel studying Chinese character processing technology. Among them, Ni Guangnan, Zhu Naigang, Wan Yongxi, etc., in 1968, in order to solve the problem of human-computer interaction, In 2006, a display capable of displaying 256 Chinese characters was first developed on the "717 Computer". Later, there was new development in the "SK-1 Light Pen Graphic Display", which can display Chinese characters with different glyphs. A light pen was also introduced as a human-machine display. means of interaction. In the early 1970s, the Lenovo input method was first proposed. The so-called "Lenovo" means that after you input the character "中", the computer will automatically display Chinese characters such as "国", "central", and "jian" as the next character. candidate words. These technologies were later integrated into the "111 Chinese Character Information Processing System", which used a standard keyboard and light pen, adopted the Lenovo input method, and also used its own developed Chinese character display and Chinese character dot matrix printer as output means, forming a more complete The Chinese character processing system became the Chinese character processing platform of the English-Chinese machine translation system at that time.
After that, based on it, the "LX-80 Chinese character graphics microcomputer" was developed using the Z80 chip in 1983. All of the above are the scientific research results of Ni Guangnan and his colleagues at the Institute of Computing Technology. And LX is the first two letters of Lenovo’s Chinese pinyin LianXiang.
In November 1984, the Computing Institute decided to establish the Computing Institute Company and invested 200,000 yuan. The general manager was Wang Shuhe, and Liu Chuanzhi and Zhang Zuxiang were the vice presidents. They brought out 11 people from the Computing Institute, but There was still a lack of a technical leader and a competitive product, so the three bosses thought of one person at the same time. In December, they invited the 12th person to join the company, and this was Ni Guangnan.
Ni Guangnan was transplanting the Chinese character technology of the "LX-80" machine to the PC. Although the "LX-80" was independently developed, it was an 8-bit machine, while the PC was a 16-bit machine. At that time, the CCDOS Chinese character system developed by Yan Yuanchao was available on PC. It was a pure software solution with low cost, but it also had shortcomings. For example, on PC/XT, the display speed of Chinese characters was only dozens per second, and the full screen could only display ten characters. To run Chinese text, the Chinese character library occupies 1/3 of the RAM. Chinese character display must go through the BIOS, destroying the 'direct screen writing' protocol, making Western software unable to adapt, etc. So Ni Guangnan transplanted the Lenovo Chinese character technology that had been implemented on the LX-80 to the PC and developed an expansion card for the PC, named Lenovo Chinese Card (LX-PC). It combines hardware and software. Whether the PC processes Chinese or Western languages, the display speed remains unchanged, the display format remains unchanged, the font library does not occupy RAM, the 'direct screen writing' protocol remains unchanged, and Western software basically does not need to be 'Chinese' to process Chinese.
The Institute of Computing Technology invited Ni Guangnan to join the company, obviously because they saw that the Hanka he made was about to be released. At that time, the first companies to invest in the Hanka for Ni Guangnan were China Information Communications Corporation and China Aviation Technology Shenzhen Industrial and Trade Center. However, since Ni Guangnan became the chief engineer of the Computing Institute, this was tantamount to using the technology of Lenovo Hanka (according to current parlance). That is intellectual property rights) brought into the computing company. In this case, whose product belongs to whom? At that time, the Computing Institute Company and Xintong Company reached a cooperation agreement in the development and sales of Hanka. According to Zhu Qiaosheng, Xintong's vice president in charge of development at the time, the agreement stipulated that both parties should share the profits 50/50. However, in the first half of 1985, the first Of the 100 RMB Hanka produced in batches, the Computing Institute Company sold 93 RMB, while Xintong only sold 7 RMB. So the Calculation Institute Company proposed to take the majority of the profit, while Xintong insisted on a 50-50 split as per the original agreement. In the end, with Xintong's insistence, the profit was indeed divided 50-50, but the cooperation between the two parties on Hanka ended here.
Looking back at the development process of Lenovo Hanka from the current perspective, it should be said that the most important thing is the results and technology accumulation of Ni Guangnan and others in the Institute of Computing Technology for many years. This is the result of the institute’s many years of scientific research investment. Results. Later, Xintong and other units also invested tens of thousands of yuan and bought two PC/XTs for development, which provided material guarantee for the final development of Hanka. Within half a year, a leading product will be launched on the market. Now, when talking about Lenovo's entrepreneurship, the media often only mention the initial investment of 200,000 yuan received by the computing company, while ignoring the previous technology accumulation and investment in intangible assets of the computing institute. In addition, the later sales of Lenovo Hanka also required a large amount of working capital, which was also guaranteed by the Computing Institute. Now the media only says "nothing" about the Computing Institute's contribution to Lenovo, which is one-sided.
When talking about the historical role of Hanka, Ni Guangnan still believes that from the founding of the Computing Institute to the renamed Lenovo Group in 1989, until 1995, the company's slogan has always been: "Develop, produce, "One-stop sales and service" and "technology, industry and trade", everyone said this in documents and speeches, and they all do it. Therefore, when Liu Chuanzhi suddenly proposed "trade, industry and technology" in 1998, Ni Guangnan found it incomprehensible. Ni believes that for a high-tech company, technological innovation is the soul, so it should be called "technical industry and trade". The success of the company's entrepreneurship is also based on the "technical industry and trade" route. The earliest Lenovo Hanka sold for more than 4,000 yuan per piece, but the cost was less than 2,000 yuan. Later, the largest-selling Type 7 Hanka cost 1,260 yuan, and the price was 2,500 yuan. Therefore, Lenovo Hanka is a high-profit product.
If this company did not have unique technology, how could it maintain high profits? At that time, the company had neither brand nor scale. It was not driven by the Lenovo Hanka, and microcomputers were not easy to sell. Therefore, Ni Guangnan very much agrees with the summary of Zhu Lilan, the leader of the National Science and Technology Commission: "The success of Lenovo Group is a reflection of the achievements accumulated by the Institute of Computing over the years. It would not work without such a solid scientific and technological background."