The Dream of Computing

中国梦电脑梦

Many may believe that the personal computer was an invention of the US and yes that's where it was invented. But only few knew that it was invented by a Chinese man, An Wang(王安). Wang founded the company, Wang Laboratories that created the first affordable computers. Smaller and cheaper than the mini computers of his day, they are the world's 1st personal computers. But Wang insisted on calling them calculators. The process of change and revolution in computing is signposted by the move from mainframe to mini and then mini to micro. This is such a neat and pleasing trend that we tend to forget that there were developments and companies that fit into the gaps left out in this scheme. Some may remember Wang Laboratories as one of the leading producers of computer equipment but still a majority would have never heard about this giant of the computer age. Some might even say that Wang was unfortunate in not quite managing to invent the personal computer simply because of a lack of vision but the real story is so much more interesting and oppositely different. Born in Shanghai in 1920, Wang experience the devastating Japanese Invasion. During this time he studied in Chiao Tung University. After graduating, he built radios for the Chinese Army to resist the Japanese invaders.

In 1945, before the Japanese surrender. Wang took an opportunity to go to the US for training. His vision was that Chinese Engineers would bring China into the 20th century

Introduction

The Great Computing Innovator, Wang An

once the war was finally over. Arriving to the US he witness his companions taking jobs in the big engineering companies. He went to Harvard University. In 1945, just before the war against Japan was over, he went to Harvard as a graduate student of physics. In 1947, he continued his studies in Harvard and eventually got his PhD in Applied Physics in 1948. After graduation, Wang remained in Harvard, where he helped Howard Aiken's to design Havard Mark IV, the first all electronics computer, at Harvard's Computation Lab. In 1949, Wang teamed up with Chinese college, Dr Way-Dong Woo. Together they invented the magnetic pulse-transfer controlling device for

computer memory. The invention refers to the way the device's magnetic field controls the switching current in electro-mechanical systems, as in a computer. Not long after this magnificent creation, Dr Way-Dong Woo fell ill and sadly passed away. As a result Wang became the sole owner of this patent which was not granted to him until 1955.

After graduation, Wang worked in Harvard Computational Laboratory with Howard Aiken, who was not the easiest of task masters. Aiken gave him a challenging task to solve, how to store data magnetically and at speed. For three weeks, Wang struggled with the task. He considered using rings made out of a special magnetic material that had a strong residual flux which meant if you placed it in a magnetic field and then switched the field off, it would remain magnetized. It was obvious how to read the core but the act of reading destroyed the stored data. While walking across the Harvard courtyard he finally figured out the. If the data could be read then it could be rewritten back to the core. Wang had invented dynamic memory. Soon afterwards, he found the right material and used the cores to build magnetic delay lines, similar to magnetic shift registers. He considered this new idea worth patenting however Aiken disagrees. Nevertheless, Wang's fiancee, Lorraine Chiu, encouraged him to proceeded and he was granted a broad patent on the use of magnetic cores as memories.

Wang Laboratories:

As Harvard decides to down play computer research, Wang started to think hard about his future. Having enough savings to last a year, he decided to start his own business for he had little to lose. Even if his business failed he could get a job. With only $600 USD, no orders, no contracts and no office furniture, he formed a sole proprietorship. He names his company Wang Laboratories, specializing in magnetic memories. He sold magnetic cores which he built $4 USD each. Later in the year, Harvard refunded $1000 from his pension plan which

The Magnetic Pulse-Transfer Controlling Invented by Wang An and Dr Way-Dong Woo

Wang Laboratories

provided additional security. Wang's business grew but modestly. At the end of the first year he had enough to continue and so he did. Because Wang was inexperience in doing business the US, his company was mainly a research and consultancy company but once he got a little more experience, his company was turned into a manufacturer. Wang's first product was a set of Logiblocs, electronic modules that implemented basic logic functions for use by control engineers. Later they built a phototypesetting machine called Linasec with Compugraphic. The machine was very successful but just as Wang Laboratories was turning into a large company the rug

The LOCI Calculator, the World's First PC

was pulled out from under it when Compugraphic decided to make the machines itself, leaving Wang with nothing. However this is not the end of Wang Laboratories. As Wang was still learning about US business practice, he took each incident as a lesson not to be repeated.

When Wang realized that engineers and scientists were in need of good desktop calculators, Wang Laboratories made a real breakthrough. As machines were slow and were unable to work out the necessary scientific functions. Wang came up with a bright idea to use a factor-combining method for working out logarithms and based the whole machine on this principle. Factor-combining algorithms can compute functions like log, sin and cos using nothing but addition, shifts and a lookup table. These are ideal for machines that don't have a hardware multiplier. As result, he invented the LOCI Calculator which was very cheap and easy to use and cheaper and was sold in large numbers to the scientific and engineering community that was desperate for computational power. The product was so successful that even years later his competitors were still wondering how the LOCI could calculate

logarithms with so little electronics. Over time the LOCI and the other calculators that Wang designed had the following features:

They were programmable.
They had I/O devices.
They were modular.

With these three features Wang's calculators are actually minicomputers. However Wang did not call them computers and still called them calculators. Conclusively Wang invented the personal computer. As Wang Laboratories continued to build calculators. The company released Wang 300 which was even easier to use and more successful than LOCI. Later he became convinced that the ultimate easy to use calculator would be a machine that could be programmed in Basic, a new programming language at Wang's time. After releasing Wang 700, Wang Laboratories finally released Wang 3300 which was programed with Basic. The Wang 2200 was clearly

a minicomputer and was special because it had Basic in ROM. When switched on and the machine could run Basic programs without having to spend tens of minutes loading the system. Clearly a minicomputer and yet Wang still insisted on calling it a computing calculator to avoid setting off the alarm bells!

By 1971 the writing for the calculator market was on the wall. Wang predicted and understood what LSI (large scale integration) chips would do to his profitable market. The chip manufacturers would control the price of chips and the calculator companies would be at their mercy. So he made a brave move to get out of calculators which that most of Wang Laboratory's revenues were generated by. Wang decided that word processing was the next step and he build dedicated word processing hardware long before VDU displays made the task easier and friendlier. He was in direct competition with IBM and sales were lost when his product didn't perform to standard. Wang wasn't surprised when he discovered that a stabilizing spring was missing from all

The Much Easier to Use Wang 300, LOCI's Successor

Selectrics sold to OEMs. With the spring in place the machine worked and sold well. His later word processors used VDU displays and were considered by many to be the best possible. Even though Wang had predicted correctly the effect that LSI chips would have on the calculator market he didn't guess that the eventual result would be the personal computer. By 1978, Wang Laboratories was the largest worldwide supplier of CRT word processing systems, with fifty thousand users. In a few years 80% of the 2,000 largest US firms had bought Wang equipment. At one time, it was said, every secretary in America swore by Wang products making the company a rival of IBM. Unfortunately, the days of the dedicated word processor were eventually numbered and, sadly, Wang passed away in 1990. After his death Wang Laboratories went into decline with the worst of the cutbacks had taken effect. The days for the Chinese owned company to challenge IBM was came to an end. However IBM has not seen the last of the Chinese, a computer company in China was emerging to become IBM's future rival.

An Wang was a cautious man who took business a step at a time and always weighed up the risks - a Confucian philosopher of the computer industry. He undoubtedly built world's the 1st desktop computers but had the good business sense not to draw attention to this fact.

The Development of Computers in China:

n 1956, the Long-Range Plan for the Development of Science and Technology from 1956-1967 commissioned a group of scientists and researchers to develop computer technology for national defense. The Plan's goals included furthering radio, telecommunication, and atomic energy projects. Shorty thereafter, the first state-sanctioned computer development program began with the Chinese Academy of Sciences affiliated Beijing Institute of Computing Technology (ICT). In 1958, the first Chinese-made computer was developed by the Institute of Military Engineering at the University of Harbin as part of the ICT. The computer, dubbed the 901, was a vacuum tube

The Development of Computers in China

One of the World's 1st Desktop Computer, Wang 2200

computer. In the 1960s, the Soviets withdrew its technical and financial assistance, there was a deeply felt loss of technical expertise that stunted development. Nevertheless, transistor-based computers including the 109B, 109C, DJS-21, DJS-5 and C-2 were developed. The 1960s, known as the period of Chinese Self-Reliance, was a time when large improvements and advances were made. By the late 60s, Chinese computers do not resemble Soviet computers nor their Western counterparts. The new transistor-based machines were distinctly Chinese creations. In 1977, China's first microcomputer, the DJS-050 was developed. In 1978, China’s aggressive plan for technological development was announced at the Chinese National Conference on Science and Technology. Further developing microcomputers, integrated circuits, and national databases were all declared priorities. In 1983, the China developed the nations first supercomputer, Galaxy. Two year later, 1985, China successfully built the nations first personal computer, the Great Wall 0520CH. The Great Wall models commanded a substantial share of the

Chinese domestic computer market for the next decade. A year latter, the 1986 Seventh Development Plan marked a turning point in China’s commercial computer industry, as the electronics industry was designated as a "pillar" that would help drive the entire Chinese economy. In 1987, Professor Qian Tianbai sent the first email from China, signifying China’s first use of the Internet. The email message was: "Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world." In 1993, the China Center for Information Industry Development (中国电子信息产业发展研究院) pulbilished the 50-page weekly computer magazine, China Computer Education (中国电脑教育报). Commonly referred to as "CCE", the majority of its readers are teachers and students of information technology and computer science. The content of the magazine involves product testing, computer hardware, software applications, news and commentary, and the submission of student papers. The magazine has a single-issue circulation of 350,000 copies, and is the largest IT media publication in mass circulation within China. Since May 20, 2013 onwards, the magazine was renamed China Informatization Weekly (中国信息化周

报). In 1994, the National Computing & Networking Facilities of China project opened a 64K dedicated circuit to the Internet. Since then, China has been officially recognized as a country with full functional Internet accessibility. The 1996 Ninth Five Year National Development Plan emphasized the development of technical infrastructure and expanding the personal computer industry. In 1999, the National Research Center for Intelligent Computing Systems announced that it developed a super server system capable of conducting 20 billion floating-point operations per second, making China one of the few nations in the world that have developed high-performance servers.

Cangjie Input Method:

In 1976, the world's 1st Chinese input method that uses the QWERTY keyboard to enter Chinese words, the Canjie Input Method, was successfully invented by Chu Bong-Foo (朱邦復). Cangjie is based on the graphological aspect of the characters: each basic, graphical unit is represented by a basic character component, 24 in all, each mapped to a particular letter key on a standard QWERTY keyboard. An additional, "difficult character" function is mapped

Coding of the Canjie Input Method

Cangjie Input Method

to the X key. Within the keystroke-to-character representations, there are four subsections of characters: the Philosophical Set (corresponding to the letters 'A' to 'G' and representing the sun, the moon and the five elements), the Strokes Set (corresponding to the letters 'H' to 'N' and representing the brief and subtle strokes), the Body-Related Set (corresponding to the letters 'O' to 'R' and representing various parts of human anatomy), and the Shapes Set (corresponding to the letters 'S' to 'Y' and representing complex and encompassing character forms). The basic character components in Cangjie are called "radicals" (字根) or "letters" (字母). There are 24

Netac-USB-Stick-Pen-Drive-USB-Flash-Driv

The USB Flash Drive, Invented by Netac

radicals but 26 keys; the 24 radicals (the basic shapes 基本字形) are associated with roughly 76 auxiliary shapes (輔助字形), which in many cases are either rotated or transposed versions of components of the basic shapes. For instance, the letter A (日) can represent either itself, the slightly wider 曰, or a 90° rotation of itself. The auxiliary shapes of each Cangjie radical have changed slightly between different versions of the Cangjie method; this is one reason that different versions of the Cangjie method are not completely compatible. Chu Bong-Foo provided alternative names for some letters according to their characteristics, for

example H (竹) is also called 斜 which means slant. The names form a rhyme for learners to memorize the letters, each group in a line: (The sounds of final characters are given in parentheses). Chu Bong-Foo gave up the patent of Cangjie in 1982 as he believed that it belongs to Chinese cultural heritage.

The USB Flash Drive:

In 1999, Guoshun Frank Deng and Cheng Xiaohua founded, Netac, a consumer electronics OEM company was established in Shenzhen. At the same year the company invented the USB flash drive. Netac have applied its 8MB device’s Chinese patent in December 1999. The Netac product U Disk USB flash drive was launched in 2002. By 2009, Netac had filed for over 300 patents in the US, South Korea, Singapore, and China. Over 200 of those patent applications had been filed by 2005. Netac successfully listed on the share of GEM in January 2010, known as "China's first mobile storage stocks." Netac used as the trademark of USB flash drive. As the inventor of flash

drives, the new generation of media storage products owns the world's first USB based interface and the Flash Memory technology. In June 2011, the wholly owned subsidiary of Netac and international storage technology park was established in Guangxi province. Currently the company has 335 patents and patent applications covering dozens of countries and regions in the world. Patents held include:

Chinese Patent No. ZL99117225.6 for an electronic flash memory external storage method and device.
US Patent No. 6,829,672, for an electronic flash memory external storage method and device.
Chinese Patent No. ZL02114797.3 for a USB Wireless Modem
South Korean Patent No. 583626, for a multifunction semiconductor storage device and method for booting-up computer host
Singaporean Patent No. SG119038, for an automatically executing method using semiconductor storage devices

World's Fastest Supercomputer:

October 29, 2009, the Chinese National University of Defense Technology successfully the supercomputer, Tianhe-1 (天河一号). The computer speed is of a maximum range of 2.5 petaFLOPS and is one of the few petascale supercomputers in the world. October 2010, Tianhe-1A, an upgraded version of Tianhe-1 supercomputer, was unveiled. The computer overtook the America's Jaguar, becoming the world's fastest supercomputer. This machine was equipped with 14,336 Xeon X5670 processors and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 general purpose GPUs. 2,048 FeiTeng 1000 SPARC-based processors were installed in the system. Tianhe-1A has a theoretical peak

The USB Flash Drive

World's Fastest Supercomputer

performance of 4.701 petaflops. NVIDIA suggests that it would have taken "50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs alone." The current heterogeneous system consumes 4.04 megawatts compared to over 12 megawatts had it been built only with CPUs. The Tianhe-1A system is composed of 112 computer cabinets, 12 storage cabinets, 6 communications cabinets, and 8 I/O cabinets. Each computer cabinet is composed of four frames, with each frame containing eight blades, plus a 16-port switching board. Each blade is composed of two computer nodes, with each computer node containing two Xeon X5670 6-core processors and one Nvidia M2050 GPU processor. The system has 3584 total blades

Tianhe 1, the First Chinese Supercomputer to Become the World's Fastest

containing 7168 GPUs, and 14,336 CPUs, managed by the SLURM job scheduler. The total disk storage of the systems is 2 Petabytes implemented as a Lustre clustered file system, and the total memory size of the system is 262 terabytes. Another significant reason for the increased performance of the upgraded Tianhe-1A system is the Chinese-designed NUDT custom designed proprietary high-speed interconnect called Arch that runs at 160 Gbit/s, twice the bandwidth of InfiniBand. The system also used the Chinese made FeiTeng-1000 central processing unit. The FeiTeng-1000 processor is used both on service nodes and to enhance the system interconnect. The

Video of Tianhe 2, the World's Fastest Supercomputer

supercomputer is installed at the National Supercomputing Center, Tianjin, and is used to carry out computations for petroleum exploration and aircraft design. It is an "open access" computer, meaning it provides services for other countries. Approximately 200 employees operate the computer.

June 24, 2013, Chinese researchers once again successfully developed the world’s fastest supercomputer, Tianhe-2 (天河二号), surpassing its closest rival in the United States by almost twice the operating speed. Tianhe-2 is capable of operating as fast as 33.86 petaflops per second. Developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, the new reigning supercomputer overtook Titan, a Cray XK7 Jaguar system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is now ranked second with a performance of 17.59 petaflops per second. Tianhe-2 marks China’s return to first

place on the TOP500 list since June 2011, when its predecessor Tianhe-1A was outpaced by Japans Fujitsu’s K computer which is fourth on the list with a performance of 10.51 pentaflops per second. It remained as the world's fastest supercomputer according to the TOP500 lists for June 2013, November 2013, June 2014, November 2014, June 2015, and November 2015.

June 20, 2016, China revealed a supercomputer which outperforms the Tianhe-2, making it the world's fastest supercomputer. Known as Sunway TaihuLight, the computer is a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. This follows a U.S. government decision last year to deny China access to Intel's fastest microprocessors. There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China's new system. Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops, according to the latest biannual release today of the world's Top500 supercomputers. It is the world's 1st system to exceed 100

petaflops. A petaflop equals one thousand trillion (one quadrillion) sustained floating-point operations per second. The most important thing about Sunway TaihuLight is its microprocessors. In the past, China has relied heavily on U.S. microprocessors in building its supercomputing capacity. The world's 2nd fastest system, China's Tianhe-2, which has a peak performance of 54.9 petaflops, uses Intel Xeon processors.

TaihuLight, which is installed at China's National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, uses ShenWei CPUs developed by Jiangnan Computing Research Lab, in Wuxi. The operating system is a Linux-based Chinese system called Sunway Raise. "The TaihuLight is very impressive, said Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee and one of the academic leaders of the Top500 supercomputing list, in a report about the new system.

Video of the Sunway Taihulight, the World's Fastest Supercomputer

"TaihuLight is running sizeable applications, which include advanced manufacturing, earth systems modeling, life science and big data applications. This shows that the system is capable of running real applications and isn't just a stunt machine." Dongarra said. It has been long known that China was developing a 100-plus petaflop system, and it was believed that China would turn to U.S. chip technology to reach this performance level. But just over a year ago, in a surprising move, the U.S. banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China's top supercomputing research centers. All for the purpose to slow China's supercomputing development efforts.

World‘s First Exascale Supercomputer:

Already holding the two fastest supercomputers. The Chinese Nation hopes to build another one to break the record, the world's first ever exascale supercomputer. The new machine, Tianhe-3, will handle 1 quintillion (1,000 000 000 000 000 000) calculations per second. A Director at the National Supercomputer Center at Tianjin, Meng Xiangfei,told the China Daily newspaper that his institute aims to have a prototype of its Tianhe-3 ready by 2018. For that they will need breakthroughs in high-performance processors. Meng is confident. If they succeed, Tianhe-3 will be 10 times faster than the current fastest supercomputer in the world, the Sunway TaihuLight. The Sunway runs at 93 petaFLOPS, with a reported peak speed of 125 quadrillion (125,000 000 000 000 000) calculations per second. "Its computing power is on the next level. It will help us tackle some of the world's toughest scientific challenges with greater speed, precision and scope." said Meng. The Tianhe-3 will be measured in exaFLOPS. Its sibling, the Tianhe-2 runs at 34 petaFLOPS, while the US, Titan, creaks in at 18 peteFLOPS. If the Tianhe-3 breaks the peta-barrier, its processing speed will dwarf all supercomputers in the world.

World‘s First Quantum Computer:

May 03, 2017, Chinese scientists have successfully built the world's first quantum computing machine that is 24,000 times faster than its international counterparts and may dwarf the processing power of existing supercomputers. The scientists announced their achievement at a press conference in the Shanghai Institute for Advanced Studies of University of Science and Technology of China.

Quantum computing could in some ways dwarf the processing power of today's supercomputers, according to researchers. The manipulation of multi-particle entanglement is the core of quantum computing technology and has been the focus of international quantum computing research. Pan Jianwei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lu Chaoyang and Zhu Xiaobo of the University of Science and Technology of China and Wang Haohua of Zhejiang University set international records in quantum control of the maximal numbers of entangled photonic quantum bits and entangled superconducting quantum bits. Pan said: "Quantum computers could, in principle, solve certain problems faster than classical computers."

Despite substantial progress in the past two decades, building quantum machines that can actually outperform classical computers in some specific tasks - an important milestone termed "quantum supremacy" - remains challenging. In the quest for quantum supremacy, Boson sampling - an intermediate quantum computer model - has received considerable attention, as it requires fewer physical resources than building universal optical quantum computers, Pan was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua news agency. Last year, the researchers had developed the world's best single photon source based on semiconductor quantum dots. Now, they are using the high-performance single photon source and electronically programmable photonic circuit to build a multi-photon quantum computing prototype to run the Boson sampling task. The test results show the sampling rate of this prototype is at least 24,000 times faster than international counterparts, researchers said. At the same time, the prototype quantum computing machine is 10 to 100 times faster than the first electronic computer, ENIAC, and the first transistor computer, TRADIC, in running the classical algorithm, Pan said. It is the first quantum computing machine based on single photons that goes beyond the early classical computer, and ultimately paves the way to a quantum computer that can beat classical computers.

World's 1st Exascale Supercomputer

World's 1st Quantum Computer

Sources:

An Wang - The Man Who Might Have Invented The Personal Computer

Magnectic-core memory - Wikipedia

Jerry Yang - Paul Kupperberg - Google 圖書

An Wang Inventions, Patents and Patent Applications - Justia Patents Search

an wang inventions - Google Search

Computer Pioneers - An Wang

What Happened to Wang Computers: The Wang 2200 and Beyond - BizTech

An Wang, 70, Is Dead of Cancer - Inventor and Maker of Computers - NYTimes.com

Media history of China - Wikipedia