Rebirth of America, this is my era

Chapter 147 You'd better have it!

Before traveling through time, Ethan had heard many stories about how hard work and self-discipline can help people succeed.

For example, Los Angeles at 4am, Chiba at 4am, Jakarta at 4am... These successful people who have reached the top in their respective fields seem to have endless energy and can greet the arrival of each day with passion. The only difference between them and ordinary people is that ordinary people may not have a firm will and cannot control their thoughts.

But as people around him refuted the rumors, it all became nonsense.

Vanessa said Kobe just happened to wake up at 4 a.m. sometimes;

Takahashi Yoko stated that Murakami Haruki likes to go to bed at 9 o'clock and get up at 4 o'clock. He will not work more than four hours a day. Most of the time, he will finish work around noon.
Principal Wang was even more outspoken, telling people not to blindly listen to chicken soup for the soul, saying that he was not so hard-working every day, and only worked overtime occasionally when there were urgent matters.

In his previous life, Ethan had always treated the news as fun and had never thought about pursuing the truth of the matter because it was meaningless. But today, as he stayed in his office working late into the night, he truly felt that Vanessa and Principal Wang were absolutely right.

I have already succeeded, why am I still working hard?
It’s better to play more games of Teamfight Tactics than to memorize AI chess records every day!

If there is no urgent matter, no one would be willing to work until dawn!
In the early morning of July 1977, 7, Ethan was sitting at his desk with deep emotion.

What made him feel very distressed was the pile of documents in front of him that was as high as a mountain.

Among them are bound reports, newspapers with black text on a gray background, research materials with curled footers, and tofu blocks that have been cut out and pasted together individually.

Although the sources are different, the contents published above all point to the same direction, which is a war that took place in the native land of this country in the past fifteen years.

The battle of Dian Zhuo.

Dianzhuo is actually the electronic calculator in the future that can reset to zero infinitely in the hands of the aunties in the vegetable market. It was first born in John Bull in 1961. It was a machine made of vacuum tubes, cold cathode tubes and decimal counter tubes, and could support four arithmetic operations.

Its appearance attracted the attention of the whole world, because this tool can help humans complete some complex mathematical calculations in a short time. Whether in people's daily life or in industrial production and scientific research and development, it has great room for expansion. Therefore, countless companies have entered the market. In America, the participating giants include General Instruments, Texas Instruments, and so on.

Since Japan had smoothly passed the post-war reconstruction period and was moving towards rapid development, they were eager to make breakthroughs in the field of science and technology and hoped to launch some high-tech industries. So when they discovered that calculators had great application prospects, in the mid-1960s, countless companies on the small island nation wanted to get a piece of the pie.

For example, in 1964, Hayakawa Electric launched its own product, the CS-3A;

And Sony announced its own machine, the MD-7, on the same day;

Afterwards, Canon and Oi Electric were not to be outdone and successively announced their new products.

If we only look at the news reports, most people might think that the calculator market was a fiercely competitive red ocean market at the time, but this was not actually the case.

When Ethan opened the newspaper of that year, he realized that the so-called fierce competition was all bullshit. Most companies were just entertaining themselves. Although each company launched its products with great fanfare, there were almost no buyers because calculators at that time were too big and too expensive.

Although the Hayakawa Electric machine is only the size of a cash register, it weighs 25 kilograms and costs 530,000 yen. The Canon machine is a little smaller, but it also weighs 15 kilograms and costs 390,000 yen. The Oi Electric machine is even more exaggerated, with a length and width of more than half a meter! The price of a machine is as high as 800,300 yen!

Even if this price is put at today, ten years later, it is still 50% of the average annual income of the Japanese! In the 1960s, let alone ordinary people, even companies could not afford such a toss!
Therefore, if manufacturers want to promote calculators, they must solve two problems. The first is to reduce costs as much as possible, and the second is to reduce product weight as much as possible.

These two questions may seem like nonsense, but in the process, they attracted more than 50 Japanese companies to work hard. When they found that integrated circuits were the answer, they reached a cooperation with American companies in the late 1960s.

Canon and Texas Instruments joined forces;
Hayakawa Electric and Rockwell marry;
Sanyo Electric boarded the General Instrument ship;

Busicom reached a cooperation with Intel and used the customized 4004 chip from Intel, but——

"Wow, Ethan, you called me over here out of the blue just to learn about calculators?"

"What brings it to your mind?"

Four hours ago, in the office of Destiny Game, Steve Wozniak, who had rushed in, looked through the historical documents on Ethan's desk with a strange look on his face.

When he found that no matter whether it was a magazine or a newspaper, a report or a summary, all the contents were related to the calculator, the chubby little boy with chubby cheeks immediately showed a look of surprise.

Ethan had no intention of hiding it:
"Stephen, this is what happened. I have a partnership with a gaming company in this book... and they just told me that their new product was not developed actively, but passively accepted... The company that disappeared was called Systech, and it was said to have gone bankrupt in the previous calculator war..."

When Ethan told him about the problem he encountered, Wozniacki, who was sitting in the reception chair, nodded and said, "Ethan, what your partner said is indeed true."

"Systech, a laptop company, did go bankrupt during the computer wars."

"Or..."

"When Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP-35, all computer companies around the world fell silent."

"And when we developed the HP-65..."

"Companies that have been researching in the computer field for more than a decade have almost all filed for bankruptcy because they were unable to recover the huge amount of money they invested..."

At this point, the fat boy Wozniacki smiled and spread his hands.

He told Ethan the simplest way of killing in the simplest words.

That's right!

When Hiroshi Yamauchi said on the other end of the phone that the COLOR TV GAME product had little to do with him, and that all the special codes were the result of research by Mitsubishi Electric and Systech, and that the latter had died in the previous calculator war, Ethan began his own journey of verification!
He asked Julis Noble to move all the materials related to the calculator war from the Stanford archives and library to the company, and then read them carefully, and then...

He then discovered an incredible fact!
The calculator wars were caused by John Bull's scientists...

It happened in the book...

But it ended in America!
In 1970, Bill Hewlett, a student of Fred Terman, the former president of Stanford and the founder of HP, asked HP engineers to develop a calculator that could fit into a shirt pocket. Then, in just two years, HP and Stanford Research Institute introduced the world's first scientific pocket calculator, successfully sweeping all predecessors into the dustbin of history!

But this is not the point. Although the calculator called HP-35 was very compact, other companies still had the confidence to catch up because the technological gap between them was not that big.

It only takes six months to a year for other companies to produce products similar to HP-35.

but……

Just eighteen months later, they were desperate.

Because HP released the world's first programmable handheld calculator, the HP-65!

What's even more desperate is that Steve Wozniak, an HP engineer at the time, also designed a magnetic read-write card specifically for the HP-65 to help it play music!

When the player in my pocket appears...

Investors who were full of expectations for their companies and engineers who were working hard to develop new products were all suffocated! They just typed GG! They all declared bankruptcy! Because they felt that they might not be able to catch up with HP's unconventional development ideas even if they worked for a lifetime!
According to Yamauchi Hiroshi, Systech, which was chosen by Mitsubishi Electric to copy Odyssey, was the one who fell in this technological revolution and caused the wave...

The special one is in Silicon Valley!
When Ethan discovered that he was knocked off balance by the technological revolution initiated by his own people a few years ago while running, he really felt his head buzzing.

How could a war that ended as early as 1974 still affect him?
Asiba!
What kind of crap is this!

Because the truth of the matter was too outrageous, he directly called Wozniacki, the little fat guy, from Apple. When Wozniacki took responsibility for everything and said that those Taiwanese companies were really weaklings and that they all collapsed before he even had to do anything...

Ethan felt his eyes go dark.

He had countless grievances in his heart that he could neither spit out nor swallow.

After sending away Steve Wozniak, the technical god, he was so confused that he was hiding in his office. When the witnesses of the incident and the people who started the wave had confirmed that Nintendo's news was not groundless, the probability that Yamauchi lied about the COLOR TV GAME was actually very low. And if they didn't lie?
"Fuck you!"

Ethan sighed to the sky.

"What kind of things have I encountered? First, there was Ralph Baer's amazing patent! Then there was Chuck Peteau's self-reference! Then there was Philips's repeated jumps in optical storage and the parallel promotion of magnetic storage! And Nintendo acted as a receiver and made wedding dresses for other companies! Is this the most simple business war? Why is it so difficult for me to start a business?"

Ethan was truly speechless.

He just wanted to make some money simply by relying on his memories of his past life!

Why do bad things always happen around us?
What made him most frustrated was that these things were just like carrots!

The mud can be brought out with one pull!

However, even though he felt extremely helpless, Ethan only vented for a while, then he sat back down and wrote down his own solution on the recording paper.

Although Wozniacki, a man who would never betray Nintendo, had helped Yamauchi prove that Nintendo might not have autonomy in the COLOR TV GAME project, in Ethan's opinion, all this did not mean that Nintendo was innocent in Milova's little tricks against it.

At most, it can only prove from the side that Nintendo can do anything for profit.

If not, why don’t they add a license for the COLOR TV GAME product?

Milo Huadu obediently paid for their light guns, but they refused to pay a penny for the color TV game console under the banner of Mitsubishi Electric. They just wanted to keep the profits for themselves.

Although this kind of behavior is very common in the business world, it does not mean that Ethan can accept it. In other words, he may feel at ease when using it himself, but if others use it, he will despise it!

There is no way, as long as one is a human being, he or she will have double standards.

And if that's the case...

hum!

"Mr. Arakawa, the president of your company, is your father-in-law, Mr. Yamauchi, still unable to come to North America?"

The next morning at nine o'clock, Ethan met with Arakawa Minoru again.

Perhaps because he hadn't slept all night, Arakawa Minoru's black and white eyes were filled with red bloodshot, and the dark bags under his eyes made his face look a little haggard.

But even so, after hearing Ethan's question, he forced a smile and kept apologizing.

"Mr. Jones, I contacted the company again after I left yesterday. Our president, Mr. Yamauchi, is indeed unable to visit the United States in the near future. Please forgive me if I have offended you."

This answer was what Ethan expected, so he nodded indifferently.

"Then I want to know, how do you decide to deal with this matter?"

After hanging up the phone with Yamauchi Hiroshi yesterday, Ethan asked Arakawa Minoru to go back to the hotel and wait for news, saying that he would investigate the truth himself. After receiving the meeting notice from the Destiny Game this morning, even without any previous information, Arakawa Minoru knew what the main content of this conversation was.

In response to Ethan's inquiry, he, who had spent an entire night to understand the details, pursed his lips and said seriously, "Mr. Jones, I don't understand what you mean."

"Because as far as I know, when my father-in-law met you last summer, he told you that he got the news from Milohua."

"From the beginning, my father-in-law never concealed his source of information from you."

"If you regard this meeting as a close cooperation between Nintendo and MILO, why didn't you ask my father-in-law directly?"

"Although you are very angry now, we at Nintendo also know that the COLOR TV GAME project is the source of your unhappiness, but we have repeatedly explained that all this was an accident."

"You can't call an accident a long-planned conspiracy."

"Because this isn't fair to any of us, is it?"

Arakawa Minoru forced a smile and gave Ethan as bright a look as possible.

"Mr. Jones, you were able to take control of the North American gaming industry within two years. I believe that this was based on your extraordinary mind and amazing creativity, not on conjecture or groundless speculation, right?"

Arakawa Minoru's question made Ethan laugh. His words also reminded Ethan of his meeting with Yamauchi Hiroshi last summer.

Ethan admitted that at that time, Yamauchi Hiroshi did take the initiative to mention Milohua.

Not only that, Yamauchi Hiroshi also told him with great shame that it was only after he came into contact with Milova that he realized that there was a conflict between the two parties. For this, he even apologized to Ethan for his recklessness.

At that time, Ethan felt that there was a reason for Yamauchi Hiroshi's success!
He really has a way with people!
The words are full of sincerity!
Now it seems...

That's just like an old sow wearing condoms, one after another!
"Mr. Arakawa, your father-in-law, Mr. Yamauchi, is indeed an excellent businessman."

Ethan, who was leaning on the sofa, smiled and said, "When he took the initiative to mention Mirowa in front of me last year, maybe Nintendo had already taken over the COLOR TV GAME project, right?"

"Maybe he knew something was going to happen, so he spoke up in advance to put my guard down?"

"Oh - Mr. Jones -" Arakawa wanted to retort.

But Ethan didn't give him a chance.

He raised his right hand to signal for him to shut up, then smiled and said, "Apart from this matter, all your requests, agreements, and decisions in the cooperation were also intentional, right?"

"Take Snake for example. You reduced the price in the third issue to increase sales. On the surface, it was to make way for the upcoming Pac-Man, but what was the reality?"

"The shipment of 65,000 units has already reached our initial agreed upon standard. After that, no matter what conflicts we have, Nintendo will not be considered to have breached the contract on this project."

"Pac-Man, you settled a profit share of 10,000 units with us in the first and second phases. At the beginning, Mr. Yamauchi said that this was to show his sincerity and Nintendo's friendliness in the cooperation, but now it seems that this is actually forced performance of the contract."

"When Nintendo has already fulfilled the contract, if I unilaterally breach the contract, I will be sued and have to pay liquidated damages, right? Because whether it is the advance payment of dividends or the payment time, it shows your sincerity and facts in fulfilling the contract normally, and my call to stop is just speculation without evidence. The court will not accept my statement unless I can provide evidence that you have harmed me, but-"

"I don't?"

Ethan smiled and blinked.

But Arakawa actually pursed his lips and said nothing.

This situation made Ethan laugh twice, and he continued, "There is also a third thing, which is the chip factory. According to the agreement, the official start date of the chip factory should be August this year, which is next month, and their first project should be Pac-Man."

“But you started early.”

"Because you're afraid I'll stop this."

"When the machines in the factory start running, and when you officially start cooperating with your country's Benzi Electric, my call to stop is unilaterally tearing up the contract."

"You don't have to obey my orders without a reasonable explanation. And you can still do your job well with MOS because you followed the needs of Chuck Pete and his team. You didn't mean to monopolize the 6502. Everything you did was to provide cheap chips to the world."

"Right?"

That's right!

When Ethan calmed down and carefully studied the latest financial report submitted by Nintendo in the early hours of the morning, he discovered that Yamauchi Hiroshi was indeed not a vegetarian!
There are traps in all contracts!
More importantly, these pitfalls were dug for the better benefit of Party A!

When these clauses that initially seemed to be "for your own good" turned into a murderous axe, wasn't the final answer obvious?

So it’s normal for Nintendo to be fearless now!

And humble?
That's just because Ethan Jones showed unparalleled creativity!

"Mr. Jones, I don't understand what you are talking about."

Arakawa Minoru took a deep breath and sighed, "We are really just cooperating normally."

"Really?" Ethan asked with a smile. Before Arakawa could answer, he said, "I don't believe it."

'...'

When Ethan used the question-and-answer method that a certain host in his previous life often used, Arakawa Minoru was stunned.

He was stunned for two seconds before he forced a smile.

"Mr. Jones, as you said, everything requires evidence."

"What I said is the evidence." Ethan replied with a smile.

'? ? ? '

Such unreasonable words made Arakawa Minoru frown.

"Mr. Jones, I think your current state may not be suitable for discussing cooperation..."

Arakawa finally couldn't hold it in any longer and said, "If you're feeling unwell, I can stay in Palo Alto for a few days and come visit you when you've recovered..."

"No need." Ethan waved his hand and said, "The most important thing you should do now is to go back."

"Go back to your country."

"Return to Kyoto."

"Meet your father-in-law, Yamauchi Hiroshi."

"Tell him that I, Ethan Jones, need a satisfactory answer."

Arakawa narrowed his eyes.

Ethan's suddenly stern face made him feel uncomfortable.

At this moment, he even wanted to ask Ethan whether he wanted to start a war.

But the next second, he swallowed back the words that were about to come out of his mouth!

The pupils suddenly contracted!
Because, Ethan said - "You may think I'm arrogant, but I want to tell you that in this matter, what I said is the evidence."

"The president of your company found me last summer because of Mi Luohua's notice."

"The president of your company cooperated with Mi Luohua intentionally, or perhaps unintentionally, to allow me to stay in your country for a month."

"I really don't know how much you made from this business, but I know that you need to give me a satisfactory answer. For this, I can give you a week."

"If your answers still make me angry, I can only say sorry to you, and I will drive Nintendo out of the gaming industry!"

"As for the method, it's also very simple, right?"

"You are eager to give me an early settlement on the Pac-Man project. Doesn't that mean you want to continue to be the agent of this product after the COLOR TV GAME incident?"

"You are eager to get the chip company to start production. Isn't that because you want to continue to obtain chip production capacity after the COLOR TV GAME incident?"

"Okay, I'll satisfy you."

"I won't tear up the contract, you can still sell it, and you still have to give me dividends."

"but--"

"You guys can forget about getting Star Wars."

"And then there's only one thing I'm going to do, which is call George Lucas and tell him I want Star Wars to be released in your country as soon as possible."

"At the same time, in order to promote the movie, I will authorize Fox to sell the Star Wars game overseas so that they can sell the game consoles to cinemas in your country."

"In fact, I have always been curious about which one is a better game, Pac-Man or Star Wars? I have never found an opportunity to experiment before, but now is the opportunity, right?"

"Don't you want to eat the profits from Pac-Man?"

"Okay, I'll satisfy you."

Ethan is not stupid! He will not take the initiative to break up the cooperation with Nintendo!
Because there is no evidence for what happened before!
But that’s not important, right?
When Nintendo tried desperately to fulfill the contract ahead of schedule and tried desperately to protect the game and chip agents with high liquidated damages and lawsuits, they had already exposed their own weakness!
Now, they hope more than anyone else to continue to reap the dividends of those popular games!
In this case, the handling is actually simpler, right?

Don’t you Nintendo want to make money? Don’t you Nintendo want to make games?
you can!

I'll satisfy you!

In the meantime, I'll sell Star Wars in your market!
In my previous life, when the Millennium Falcon flew over your island nation, the "Space Invaders" without any blessing was sold out, and now, when the genuine "Star Wars" appeared...

You guys at Nintendo are selling Pac-Man to me!

I can’t fucking crush you to death!
The most important thing is, when Star Wars is released in Japan, whether Pac-Man becomes a hit or not, it will be no loss to me, because I charge by the unit!

Nintendo also signed a guarantee!

"Star Wars" is selling well, I make money!

"Pac-Man" is still selling well, and you Nintendo still have to give me a share of the money!

And when there are more products to share the total market, Nintendo, which can open its own game halls, will inevitably earn less!
Yes--

Ethan remembered the game hall that Yamauchi Hiroshi introduced to him when he visited Honko last year.

The scene of building your own machine and earning coins is really beautiful!
He was very envious then, but now...

Ha ha!

"Mr. Jones - you -" After figuring out all this, Arakawa Minoru became anxious for the first time.

He wanted to say something, but Ethan stopped him with a smile.

"Mr. Arakawa, I have one last thing to say to you."

"When we in the United States think you have something, you better have it."

"Otherwise, you will be at a loss~"

Before he finished speaking, Ethan stood up.

He patted the young man on the shoulder and walked out mercilessly.

Note: ① Hayakawa Electric is actually Sharp. ② HP-35 was the most powerful calculator at the time, and it dominated the market as soon as it was released. Before the emergence of personal computers, HP-65 was considered a personal computer by people at the time, and it was even used by NASA in astronauts' space missions. ③ For me, the calculator war should have ended in the 1975s, because in the early s, Casio launched a product that changed the history of calculators and electronic games. But for me, the calculator war ended in when Altair appeared, because a new personal computer war had arrived. The viewpoint adopted in this article is that of the United States.

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(End of this chapter)