Hogwarts: From Selling White Peppers to Becoming a God

Chapter 140 Blue Queen and Cornerstone

"I'm so excited," Patrick said. "I've always had a heart condition, and my doctor told me I should avoid getting emotionally agitated. But unfortunately, I haven't been able to do that."

"I've been waiting for this day for two years," Patrick said. "Sometimes I even feel like my whole life has been waiting for this day to come."

"Thank you again to everyone, and to Umbrella Corporation, and to my friend, Mr. Morpheus Annon, the founder of Umbrella, for giving me this opportunity to come here and share our products with you."

Patrick became somewhat emotional, and the audience cheered and applauded in response.

"About two years ago, when Morpheus told me he had decided to go into the electronics field, I honestly thought he was crazy."

"I said, NO, you're not serious."

He said, "Yes, I'm serious."

I said, NO!

He said, "Yes!"

"I said, we will fail."

He said, "No, we have to make this happen."

"We argued for a long time. After all, everyone knows that Umbrella Corporation is a pharmaceutical company. We have made the world's best trauma treatment drugs, but the electronics industry is not our strength."

"If you get injured, even if a nerve is severed, Yunnan Baiyao can heal you, but it can't fix a computer!"

"So I asked him, 'Why? Why go into the electronics field? Why is it absolutely necessary to do this?'"

"Morpheus convinced me with just one sentence."

He said, "Patrick, we must advance technology; we must change the world!"

The room fell silent for a moment, then burst into applause. Twenty or thirty years from now, this would be a common phrase used by internet companies, but when Patrick said it, it was full of heartfelt sincerity.

As the applause subsided, Patrick said, "Please allow me to introduce our proudest product, the personal computer, which will surely change the world. Then!"

As he finished speaking, the deep blue color on the screen suddenly converged towards the Umbrella Corporation logo in the center and merged into the icon. The icon itself was also stained by the deep blue color, gradually changing from its original red and white to an umbrella shape with alternating deep and light blue.

Then, each sector in the icon disappeared clockwise in turn, and as the last sector vanished, a computer with an all-silver-gray body appeared on the screen.

The silver-gray host resembles a super-modern building, with a hollowed-out mesh in the three vertical metal frames at the front. There are no other decorations, only a button with a blue umbrella icon, which serves as the power button.

The slim LCD monitor is also extremely clean and tidy, with rounded edges and a minimalist design. The front only has an umbrella icon as the power switch.

The dynamic display lasted for half a minute.

Patrick then spoke again, "We have incorporated six world-leading technologies into this computer: a large-size high-resolution LCD monitor, a groundbreaking 64-bit chip—Silver Dragon One, a brand-new architecture memory: Mana, an independent graphics processor—Blue Dragon graphics card, a self-developed next-generation desktop system: Cornerstone, an ultra-large solid-state drive, and an ultra-high-speed mechanical hard drive, etc."

Before I give you a detailed introduction, I'd like to demonstrate this computer to you.

After he finished speaking, a staff member pushed a display stand up, on which was placed a "Blue Queen".

After connecting the host to the large screen, Patrick pressed the power button.

In an instant, the black screen lit up, and then a blue umbrella icon appeared in the center of the black screen. Eight alternating fan-shaped blocks disappeared and reappeared in a clockwise direction, indicating in the most intuitive way that the system was loading.

However, just two or three seconds later, the loading animation suddenly stopped, and then the screen brightened up, revealing an extremely clear and simple desktop.

In an instant, the hall fell silent.

"We adopted a high-speed solid-state drive loading system, which makes the subsequent boot time only three seconds," Patrick explained at the opportune moment.

"What you see now is our self-developed desktop system: Cornerstone."

"When the system was first designed, Morpheus set several principles for project manager Bob Henderson."

"First, the desktop system is the cornerstone connecting hardware and software applications. As an intermediate layer, it must be portable and modular, and be able to flexibly support more hardware environments."

"Currently, the Cornerstone system supports not only our self-developed hardware, but also the vast majority of CPUs, memory and other hardware on the market."

"However, because the Cornerstone system was developed to our next-generation hardware standards, it can only provide a limited set of functions when using insufficiently powerful hardware."

Upon hearing this, Intel's Paul Otellini frowned, a sense of foreboding creeping over him.

"Morpheus's second principle for Bob was: to ensure a good user experience, it must be compatible with a sufficient number of software programs."

"Based on the development manuals of several competitors, we have optimized the Cornerstone system to the maximum extent possible, making it backward compatible with most software in the environments of our competitors, such as Windows, Linux, and Unix systems."

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer also frowned.

"Third, the cornerstone system must have unprecedented ease of use, so that anyone who has never used it before can become familiar with most of its operations immediately."

"To this end, we adopted a polymorphic interaction mechanism, fully considering things from the user's perspective, removing all cluttered and disorganized instructions, and returning the right to explore the system's functions to the user. This button..."

Patrick said, clicking the blue umbrella icon in the lower left corner of the desktop. "We call it the Start button. You can find almost all the functions in the Cornerstone system here."

Upon hearing this, both Paul and Steve Ballmer looked at Jobs, who was standing not far away.

As we all know, simplifying complexity and focusing on user experience have always been the product philosophies that Steve Jobs championed most.

"The final principle: The foundational system must possess unparalleled performance."

At this point, Patrick dragged the mouse to demonstrate opening and closing folders, dragging windows, and dragging, organizing, deleting, and sorting files—all operations were as smooth as flowing water.

Gradually, a buzzing of conversation filled the hall, punctuated by occasional exclamations.

Suddenly, someone in the audience shouted, "How many frames did you use for your animation?"

Patrick glanced at it and recognized Steve Ballmer. "All the animations in the Foundation System are 60 frames per second."

"How is this possible? Your image resolution is so high. If it's all 60 frames per second, won't there be frame drops and stuttering? How do you allocate performance? Are you going to use all the memory to display the animation? How did you solve this problem?"

Patrick laughed. "You've hit the nail on the head, a friend from a competitor."

"The solution to this problem is actually not to solve it."

"What?"

Steve Ballmer was stunned. "Are you kidding me?"

"I'm not kidding," Patrick said. "In our view, the root of the display problem isn't that higher animation frame rates consume too much performance, but rather that the current hardware is simply too inefficient!"

"If we had a well, would we care about spilling a drop or two?"

"The Umbrella Corporation doesn't want to compromise the user experience over a drop or two of water. Our solution is to dig a well."

(End of this chapter)