Chapter 140: Blue Queen and Cornerstone

"I am very excited." Patrick said, "My heart has always been not very good, my doctor told me that I should avoid emotional excitement. But unfortunately, I can't do it."

"For two years, I have been waiting for this day." Patrick said, "Even, sometimes I feel that my whole life has been waiting for this day to come."

"Thanks again to everyone, and thanks to Umbrella Company, thanks to my friend — the founder of Umbrella, Mr. Morpheus Anon, for giving me this opportunity to come here and share our products with everyone."

Patrick was a bit emotional, and the atmosphere group on the stage also gave applause and a few cheers and encouragement at the right time.

"About two years ago, when Morpheus told me that he decided to enter the electronics field. To be honest, I thought he was crazy."

"I said, NO, you are not serious."

"He said, Yes, I am serious."

"I said, NO!"

"He said, Yes!"

"I said, we will fail."

"He said, no, we must make this happen."

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

"If you are injured, even if the nerves are broken, White Medicine can cure you, but it can't fix a computer!"

"So I asked him, Why? Why enter the electronics field? Why must this be done?"

"Morpheus convinced me with one sentence."

"He said, Patrick, we must push the progress of technology, we must change this world!"

The meeting was silent for a while, and then a burst of applause broke out. Placed twenty or thirty years later, this is already the common rhetoric of internet companies, but at this moment, spoken by Patrick, it was full of moving sincerity.

After the applause subsided, Patrick said: "Please allow me to introduce our proud product, the personal computer that will surely change the world. Blue Queen!"

As his words fell, the full-screen deep blue color suddenly gathered towards the Umbrella company logo in the center, and merged into that icon, and the icon was also infected by the deep blue color, gradually turning into an umbrella shape with deep blue and light blue interlaced.

Then, each fan-shaped piece in the icon disappeared in clockwise order. With the disappearance of the last piece, a silver-gray computer appeared on the screen.

The host was like a super-modern building, with hollow grids in the three vertical metal frame lines at the front, without any other decoration, only a button with a blue Umbrella icon as the power button.

The slim LCD monitor was also extremely clean and tidy, with rounded edges, also adopting a minimalist design, and the front also only had an Umbrella icon as a switch.

The dynamic display screen lasted for half a minute.

Patrick then spoke again, "We have poured six major technologies leading the world into this computer: large-size high-resolution LCD monitor, epoch-making 64-bit chip — Silver Dragon No. 1, brand-new architecture memory: Mana, independent graphics processor — Blue Dragon graphics card, self-developed next-generation desktop system: Cornerstone, super-large solid-state hard drive, super-high-speed mechanical hard drive, etc."

"Before the specific introduction, I want to demonstrate this computer to everyone first."

After he finished speaking, a staff member pushed a display stand up, and what was placed on it was a "Blue Queen" computer.

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

In an instant, the pitch-black screen lit up, and then the blue Umbrella icon appeared in the center of the black screen. The eight alternating fan-shaped pieces disappeared and appeared in clockwise order, using the most intuitive way to show that the system was loading.

However, after only two or three seconds, the loading animation stopped abruptly, and then the screen brightened, and an extremely clear and concise desktop appeared in front of everyone.

In an instant, the meeting hall was silent.

"We used a high-speed solid-state hard drive to load the system, making the Blue Queen's boot speed only three seconds." Patrick explained at the right time.

"What everyone is seeing now is our self-developed desktop system: Cornerstone."

"At the beginning of designing this system, Morpheus determined 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 have portability and modular structure, and be able to flexibly support more hardware environments."

"Currently, the Cornerstone system supports most CPUs, memory, and other hardware on the market in addition to our self-developed hardware."

"But, because the Cornerstone system was developed according to our next-generation hardware standards, when using hardware with insufficient performance, it can only provide limited functions."

Hearing this, Intel's Paul Otellini frowned, having a bad premonition.

"The second principle Morpheus proposed to Bob is: in order to ensure the user's experience, it must be able to be compatible with enough software."

"According to the development manuals of several friendly companies, we have made maximum optimization to the Cornerstone system, making it compatible with most software in friendly company environments such as Windows system, Linux system, Unix system, etc."

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer also frowned.

"The third, the Cornerstone system must have unprecedented ease of use, making anyone who has never used it familiar with most of its operations for the first time."

"For this reason, we adopted a polymorphic interaction mechanism, fully thinking from the user's perspective, removing all messy guidelines, and returning the exploration right of system functions to the user. This button…"

Patrick said, clicking the blue Umbrella icon at the bottom left of the desktop, "We call it the Start button. Almost all functions in the Cornerstone system can be found here."

Hearing this, Paul and Steve Ballmer both looked at Jobs not far away.

As everyone knows, simplifying the complex and focusing on user experience has always been the product philosophy most advocated by this Jobs.

"The last principle: the Cornerstone system must have unparalleled performance."

Speaking of this, Patrick dragged the mouse and demonstrated the opening and closing of folders, the dragging of windows, the dragging, organizing, and deleting of files, etc. All operations were as smooth as flowing water.

Gradually, buzzing conversations sounded in the meeting hall, and there were one or two exclamations from time to time.

Suddenly someone in the audience shouted: "What frame rate do your animations use?"

Patrick looked at the position and found it was Steve Ballmer, "All animations of the Cornerstone system are 60 frames."

"How is this possible? Your image resolution is so high. If they are all 60 frames, won't there be frame errors and lag? How do you allocate performance? Don't you want to take all the memory to display animations? How did you solve this problem?"

Patrick smiled, "You asked the point, friend from a friendly company."

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

"What?"

Steve Ballmer was stunned, "Are you kidding?"

"I'm not kidding." Patrick said, "In our view, the root cause of the display effect problem is not that higher animation frame rates will consume too much performance, but that the performance of existing hardware is too inefficient!"

"If we have a well, would we care about the one or two drops of water scattered?"

"Umbrella Company doesn't want to weaken the user's experience for the problem of one or two drops of water. Our solution is to go dig a well."

(End of this chapter) ===== CHAPTER 141 =====