For China’s young software industry, if we count from the appearance of CCDOS in 1984, the history of Chinese software is only a little more than ten years long. In these ten-odd years, batch after batch of brilliant, energetic software developers have emerged in China. They are the backbone holding up China’s software industry. Some of them worked in obscurity, some flashed by briefly, some are evergreen, and some are fresh new forces. The products they developed and their names will forever remain in the history of the development of China’s software industry. What is introduced here are several program heroes who were once famous across the country—how are they doing today?
Wu Xiaojun — Still Young at Heart
Interviewing Xiaojun was done through E-mail. After a brief letter was sent, a reply came the very next day, talking in detail about his recent situation, and at the end he added one special line: “Today is my 51st birthday, and also France’s National Day, celebrating France winning the World Cup championship.”
Among friends who do programming, Xiaojun is the oldest. I remember the first thing he told me shocked me: the 2.13 Chinese character support system was written by him line by line using Debug. That means the communication between man and computer used the most direct method possible, requiring him to remember the data in every register of the computer. In my memory, the only other person who can compare with him is Qiu Bojun. WPS was written in assembly language too, and both were fairly large software packages.
Xiaojun started playing with computers in 1983, when this was still something new and fresh, and it was also from that time that he began pondering the Chinese character problem. In 1985 he got a PC/XT machine, and Xiaojun developed version 2.11. Two months later the enhanced version 2.12 was born. By the middle of 1986, the 2.13 Chinese character support system had been successfully developed, and the later versions such as 2.13A, C, D, E, F, H became well known to a wide range of users.
As a veteran product for solving Chinese information processing, the 2.13 Chinese character support system and Xiaojun Company became equally famous, going through a once-glorious period. But because of differences in business thinking, cooperation between Xiaojun and his partners became more and more difficult. At the beginning of 1996, Xiaojun gave up the legal representative position of the company, creating the phenomenon of “Xiaojun Company without Xiaojun.” After that, when Xiaojun Company was acquired by Kelihua Company, it no longer had any direct relationship with Wu Xiaojun.
Xiaojun had come out of the former Ministry of Electronics Sixth Institute. After a full seven years, Xiaojun returned to the Sixth Institute. He is now the chief engineer of the microcomputer division of Beijing Huasheng Computer Co., Ltd. of the Rainbow Group. When asked about his future plans, he did not make any grand statements, only said he was considering the direction of future development. To sum up, some reflection is necessary, and history can also become a kind of wealth.
Bao Yueqiao & Jian Jing — Seeking Change
I have known Bao Yueqiao and Jian Jing for a long time, but we were not truly familiar with each other for very long. The reason is simple: we used to be competitors. In those hottest years for DOS Chinese-language platforms, I worked at Yijiang Company. Bao Yueqiao was the developer of UCDOS, and Jian Jing was the developer of “Chinese Dragon.” Competing products naturally had to be compared and tested against one another in the market. In the end, among the Chinese character support systems using “direct screen writing technology,” such as UCDOS, Chaoxiang, Tianhui, and Chinese Dragon, only UCDOS remains, and it is still the only DOS Chinese-language platform software still being sold today. This shows how enduring it is.
Bao Yueqiao graduated from the mathematics department of Hangzhou University in 1989. He once served as chief engineer of Beijing Hope Group, received the title of “Young Scientist” awarded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and was the main developer of UCDOS 3.0 through UCDOS/WIN7.0. Years of development experience gave him more experience than ordinary programmers, because developing Chinese-language platform software is different from developing ordinary application software: it requires more technology and more comprehensive consideration.
Jian Jing was once a key member of Kunming Mingxing Computer Company. As the designer of “Chinese Dragon,” he once became a fairly well-known software developer in the field of DOS Chinese-language platform software. In 1995, Jian Jing left Mingxing Computer Company and became deputy chief engineer of Beijing Hope Group, continuing the development of UCDOS SDK for C/C＋＋ and so on, and together with Bao Yueqiao and others developed UCDOS 7.0 and UCWIN Gold 1.0.
Before the Spring Festival of 1998, Bao Yueqiao, Jian Jing, and others left Hope Company, and several of them founded their own company—Beijing Lianzhong Computer Technology Co., Ltd.—wanting to build a career of their own.
In terms of development direction, they chose the Internet as a new breakthrough point, preparing to seize the two major hot spots in the future development of the Internet: one was web search, the other online entertainment. Web search gave rise to famous sites such as “Yahoo” and “Sohu”; while Lianzhong entered from the online entertainment side, and has now officially launched the “Lianzhong Network Game World” site (www.globallink.cn.net), providing various online games.
In their view, the Internet provides endless opportunities for program developers. As for “Lianzhong Network Game World,” Bao Yueqiao and Jian Jing’s goal is this—to build the world’s largest entertainment and gaming site owned by Chinese people themselves. Chen Jiangning — Unwilling to Fade into Silence
The name Chen Jiangning will forever be linked with the Tianhui Standard Chinese Character Support System, because he was the main developer of Tianhui 3.0, especially the Tianhui 3.1 pocket edition. With a program of just a little over 200K, it implemented the most important functions of a Chinese character support system, becoming essential software every net bug had a copy of, and this also brought Chen Jiangning considerable fame.
Chen Jiangning is a workaholic. Using the very strong word “crazy” to describe him is not excessive at all. Perhaps it is a shared trait among developers: sleeping by day and working by night has become a habit, and this habit even influenced me (the author once worked with Chen Jiangning).
Today, Chen Jiangning is deputy chief engineer of Aerospace Jinsui Company. What circulates on BBSes and the Internet is the Chinese character support system he wrote, but he himself is now engaged in the development of tax system software, which has little to do with Chinese character support systems. His daily labor remains the same, only with less of that fierce market competition and less of those exhilarating debates.
When we talk about Chinese system software and talk about the future, it is easy to feel that Chen Jiangning pays very close attention to the development of the software market, especially the development of Chinese-language platform software. When asked whether he had any new plans for the future, he said there were several directions he cared about most. One was software development centered around Chinese localization, including Chinese applications on networks; compact and practical utility software is one development direction within that. The second was the development of Chinese application software. This kind of product does not necessarily have to be large, but it should be refined and should truly solve problems that exist in computer use.
For a programmer, the happiest thing is seeing one’s work recognized by others. In this respect Chen Jiangning achieved it. As for whether he can continue to do so in the future, that depends on him.
Lei Jun — No Longer Programming
Lei Jun is now the general manager of Beijing Kingsoft Software Company, and is something of a celebrity in the software circle. He is busy all day long, and not easy to catch. Like many domestic software companies, most leaders came from technical backgrounds, and Lei Jun is also a programming expert.
Lei Jun, a graduate of Wuhan University, was already a famous computer enthusiast while in college. By his own account, during his university years he was never short of money, because helping others with work would earn him quite a bit. It was precisely because of this that he became even more obsessed with programming, and the more he played with it, the more tricks he came up with. In the software circle, the “Yellow Rose Group” of those years was very famous, and Lei Jun was one of its main forces. One of China’s famous encryption programs at the time—BITLOK—was written by Lei Jun, and small utility software that at the time almost everyone had, such as RI and so on, were all developed by Lei Jun and his group.
After that, Lei Jun joined Kingsoft.
Today, as the commanding figure at Beijing Kingsoft, Lei Jun finds he has less and less time to sit in front of a computer and write programs. The time he uses a computer most is before new products are launched, because testing work at that stage is the heaviest. Everyone in the company takes part in testing, and Lei Jun is the most important tester, because he knows the software too well.
Lei Jun’s head is now full of how to make the company run better and release more products; he no longer has time to write programs. He has transformed from a technical person into a manager, someone who understands how to operate, how to manage, how to predict the market, and how to judge software quality.
As a friend, and also as a former colleague (note: the author once served as deputy general manager of Beijing Kingsoft), I firmly believe Lei Jun still wants to program. At least, seriously battling pirates in front of a computer is much easier than struggling in the marketplace.
Zhou Zhinong — Admiring Nature
Zhou Zhinong has his own company, and also his own BBS site. The company is called Nature Software Co., Ltd., and the BBS site is called Nature Station. Both are connected with nature. Of course, what Zhou Zhinong is most famous for is still his input method—Nature Code.
In 1989, Zhou Zhinong wrote an input method in assembly language. This was Nature Code. The input method developed at that time had no version number, so Nature Code had no 1.0 version. Its official version numbering began from 2.0. The later 3.0, 3.1, 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 5.2, and 5.61 versions were all developed on that basis. Of course, these were all DOS-based versions, including those licensed to UCDOS.
Nature Code 6.0 was a version written in C＋＋. On that basis, it was continuously improved into 6.0A, 6.0A＋, and 6.0B. The 6.0B＋ version is about to be released, the latest version of Nature Code. I believe many people are waiting for this version to appear. After all, there is that old Chinese saying: habit becomes nature.
I called Zhou Zhinong, wanting to find out what he had been doing lately. In just a few short sentences, Zhou Zhinong began talking about Nature Code, and also about the Chaoxiang Chinese character support system. In 1986, Zhou Zhinong himself developed a Chinese character support system called MECCDOS. After many years of improvement, this system had become quite mature. Later, another part of form-recognition technology was integrated with MECCDOS, and in 1992 the development of the Chaoxiang Chinese character support system was completed. At that time it occupied a place among Chinese-language platform software, and its technical feature of automatic form recognition attracted the attention of many consumers. After several years of change, Chaoxiang Company went through many setbacks. Zhou Zhinong began concentrating on the study of his own Nature Code. As for the Chaoxiang Chinese character support system, Zhou Zhinong suffered quite a bit over it, and does not plan to continue doing it.
When speaking of his recent situation, Zhou Zhinong frankly said that he was modifying programs, and could not really say he was making programs. In his view, although Nature Code has gone through many years of development, it still has many imperfect parts. Many users have already become accustomed to this input method and have also put forward a large number of suggestions for improvement, so most of his energy is being put into further perfecting Nature Code.
As for the future development of Nature Code, Zhou Zhinong mentioned some ideas. The original Nature Code was only one Chinese character input scheme. Now he hopes it can be developed into a Chinese character input platform—that is, to provide multi-scheme Chinese character input technology, taking care of old users’ habits while continuing to innovate, making Chinese character input convenient and fast.
Throughout my dealings with Zhou Zhinong, I have always felt that he is not a businessman, nor the best programmer, but someone who has always been striving after certain things, certain pursuits different from others. Perhaps that is “nature.”
Regrettably, there are still many, many famous program heroes who do not appear in this article, including well-known figures such as Qiu Bojun, Liao Hengyi, Wang Zhidong, Wang Jiangmin, Zhu Chongjun, and so on. Because of time and the length of the article, they will not be introduced one by one here. However, I can tell everyone this: they are all doing very well.
Wu Xiaojun — Still Young at Heart
Interviewing Xiaojun was done through E-mail. After a brief letter was sent, a reply came the very next day, talking in detail about his recent situation, and at the end he added one special line: “Today is my 51st birthday, and also France’s National Day, celebrating France winning the World Cup championship.”
Among friends who do programming, Xiaojun is the oldest. I remember the first thing he told me shocked me: the 2.13 Chinese character support system was written by him line by line using Debug. That means the communication between man and computer used the most direct method possible, requiring him to remember the data in every register of the computer. In my memory, the only other person who can compare with him is Qiu Bojun. WPS was written in assembly language too, and both were fairly large software packages.
Xiaojun started playing with computers in 1983, when this was still something new and fresh, and it was also from that time that he began pondering the Chinese character problem. In 1985 he got a PC/XT machine, and Xiaojun developed version 2.11. Two months later the enhanced version 2.12 was born. By the middle of 1986, the 2.13 Chinese character support system had been successfully developed, and the later versions such as 2.13A, C, D, E, F, H became well known to a wide range of users.
As a veteran product for solving Chinese information processing, the 2.13 Chinese character support system and Xiaojun Company became equally famous, going through a once-glorious period. But because of differences in business thinking, cooperation between Xiaojun and his partners became more and more difficult. At the beginning of 1996, Xiaojun gave up the legal representative position of the company, creating the phenomenon of “Xiaojun Company without Xiaojun.” After that, when Xiaojun Company was acquired by Kelihua Company, it no longer had any direct relationship with Wu Xiaojun.
Xiaojun had come out of the former Ministry of Electronics Sixth Institute. After a full seven years, Xiaojun returned to the Sixth Institute. He is now the chief engineer of the microcomputer division of Beijing Huasheng Computer Co., Ltd. of the Rainbow Group. When asked about his future plans, he did not make any grand statements, only said he was considering the direction of future development. To sum up, some reflection is necessary, and history can also become a kind of wealth.
Bao Yueqiao & Jian Jing — Seeking Change
I have known Bao Yueqiao and Jian Jing for a long time, but we were not truly familiar with each other for very long. The reason is simple: we used to be competitors. In those hottest years for DOS Chinese-language platforms, I worked at Yijiang Company. Bao Yueqiao was the developer of UCDOS, and Jian Jing was the developer of “Chinese Dragon.” Competing products naturally had to be compared and tested against one another in the market. In the end, among the Chinese character support systems using “direct screen writing technology,” such as UCDOS, Chaoxiang, Tianhui, and Chinese Dragon, only UCDOS remains, and it is still the only DOS Chinese-language platform software still being sold today. This shows how enduring it is.
Bao Yueqiao graduated from the mathematics department of Hangzhou University in 1989. He once served as chief engineer of Beijing Hope Group, received the title of “Young Scientist” awarded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and was the main developer of UCDOS 3.0 through UCDOS/WIN7.0. Years of development experience gave him more experience than ordinary programmers, because developing Chinese-language platform software is different from developing ordinary application software: it requires more technology and more comprehensive consideration.
Jian Jing was once a key member of Kunming Mingxing Computer Company. As the designer of “Chinese Dragon,” he once became a fairly well-known software developer in the field of DOS Chinese-language platform software. In 1995, Jian Jing left Mingxing Computer Company and became deputy chief engineer of Beijing Hope Group, continuing the development of UCDOS SDK for C/C＋＋ and so on, and together with Bao Yueqiao and others developed UCDOS 7.0 and UCWIN Gold 1.0.
Before the Spring Festival of 1998, Bao Yueqiao, Jian Jing, and others left Hope Company, and several of them founded their own company—Beijing Lianzhong Computer Technology Co., Ltd.—wanting to build a career of their own.
In terms of development direction, they chose the Internet as a new breakthrough point, preparing to seize the two major hot spots in the future development of the Internet: one was web search, the other online entertainment. Web search gave rise to famous sites such as “Yahoo” and “Sohu”; while Lianzhong entered from the online entertainment side, and has now officially launched the “Lianzhong Network Game World” site (www.globallink.cn.net), providing various online games.
In their view, the Internet provides endless opportunities for program developers. As for “Lianzhong Network Game World,” Bao Yueqiao and Jian Jing’s goal is this—to build the world’s largest entertainment and gaming site owned by Chinese people themselves. Chen Jiangning — Unwilling to Fade into Silence
The name Chen Jiangning will forever be linked with the Tianhui Standard Chinese Character Support System, because he was the main developer of Tianhui 3.0, especially the Tianhui 3.1 pocket edition. With a program of just a little over 200K, it implemented the most important functions of a Chinese character support system, becoming essential software every net bug had a copy of, and this also brought Chen Jiangning considerable fame.
Chen Jiangning is a workaholic. Using the very strong word “crazy” to describe him is not excessive at all. Perhaps it is a shared trait among developers: sleeping by day and working by night has become a habit, and this habit even influenced me (the author once worked with Chen Jiangning).
Today, Chen Jiangning is deputy chief engineer of Aerospace Jinsui Company. What circulates on BBSes and the Internet is the Chinese character support system he wrote, but he himself is now engaged in the development of tax system software, which has little to do with Chinese character support systems. His daily labor remains the same, only with less of that fierce market competition and less of those exhilarating debates.
When we talk about Chinese system software and talk about the future, it is easy to feel that Chen Jiangning pays very close attention to the development of the software market, especially the development of Chinese-language platform software. When asked whether he had any new plans for the future, he said there were several directions he cared about most. One was software development centered around Chinese localization, including Chinese applications on networks; compact and practical utility software is one development direction within that. The second was the development of Chinese application software. This kind of product does not necessarily have to be large, but it should be refined and should truly solve problems that exist in computer use.
For a programmer, the happiest thing is seeing one’s work recognized by others. In this respect Chen Jiangning achieved it. As for whether he can continue to do so in the future, that depends on him.
Lei Jun — No Longer Programming
Lei Jun is now the general manager of Beijing Kingsoft Software Company, and is something of a celebrity in the software circle. He is busy all day long, and not easy to catch. Like many domestic software companies, most leaders came from technical backgrounds, and Lei Jun is also a programming expert.
Lei Jun, a graduate of Wuhan University, was already a famous computer enthusiast while in college. By his own account, during his university years he was never short of money, because helping others with work would earn him quite a bit. It was precisely because of this that he became even more obsessed with programming, and the more he played with it, the more tricks he came up with. In the software circle, the “Yellow Rose Group” of those years was very famous, and Lei Jun was one of its main forces. One of China’s famous encryption programs at the time—BITLOK—was written by Lei Jun, and small utility software that at the time almost everyone had, such as RI and so on, were all developed by Lei Jun and his group.
After that, Lei Jun joined Kingsoft.
Today, as the commanding figure at Beijing Kingsoft, Lei Jun finds he has less and less time to sit in front of a computer and write programs. The time he uses a computer most is before new products are launched, because testing work at that stage is the heaviest. Everyone in the company takes part in testing, and Lei Jun is the most important tester, because he knows the software too well.
Lei Jun’s head is now full of how to make the company run better and release more products; he no longer has time to write programs. He has transformed from a technical person into a manager, someone who understands how to operate, how to manage, how to predict the market, and how to judge software quality.
As a friend, and also as a former colleague (note: the author once served as deputy general manager of Beijing Kingsoft), I firmly believe Lei Jun still wants to program. At least, seriously battling pirates in front of a computer is much easier than struggling in the marketplace.
Zhou Zhinong — Admiring Nature
Zhou Zhinong has his own company, and also his own BBS site. The company is called Nature Software Co., Ltd., and the BBS site is called Nature Station. Both are connected with nature. Of course, what Zhou Zhinong is most famous for is still his input method—Nature Code.
In 1989, Zhou Zhinong wrote an input method in assembly language. This was Nature Code. The input method developed at that time had no version number, so Nature Code had no 1.0 version. Its official version numbering began from 2.0. The later 3.0, 3.1, 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 5.2, and 5.61 versions were all developed on that basis. Of course, these were all DOS-based versions, including those licensed to UCDOS.
Nature Code 6.0 was a version written in C＋＋. On that basis, it was continuously improved into 6.0A, 6.0A＋, and 6.0B. The 6.0B＋ version is about to be released, the latest version of Nature Code. I believe many people are waiting for this version to appear. After all, there is that old Chinese saying: habit becomes nature.
I called Zhou Zhinong, wanting to find out what he had been doing lately. In just a few short sentences, Zhou Zhinong began talking about Nature Code, and also about the Chaoxiang Chinese character support system. In 1986, Zhou Zhinong himself developed a Chinese character support system called MECCDOS. After many years of improvement, this system had become quite mature. Later, another part of form-recognition technology was integrated with MECCDOS, and in 1992 the development of the Chaoxiang Chinese character support system was completed. At that time it occupied a place among Chinese-language platform software, and its technical feature of automatic form recognition attracted the attention of many consumers. After several years of change, Chaoxiang Company went through many setbacks. Zhou Zhinong began concentrating on the study of his own Nature Code. As for the Chaoxiang Chinese character support system, Zhou Zhinong suffered quite a bit over it, and does not plan to continue doing it.
When speaking of his recent situation, Zhou Zhinong frankly said that he was modifying programs, and could not really say he was making programs. In his view, although Nature Code has gone through many years of development, it still has many imperfect parts. Many users have already become accustomed to this input method and have also put forward a large number of suggestions for improvement, so most of his energy is being put into further perfecting Nature Code.
As for the future development of Nature Code, Zhou Zhinong mentioned some ideas. The original Nature Code was only one Chinese character input scheme. Now he hopes it can be developed into a Chinese character input platform—that is, to provide multi-scheme Chinese character input technology, taking care of old users’ habits while continuing to innovate, making Chinese character input convenient and fast.
Throughout my dealings with Zhou Zhinong, I have always felt that he is not a businessman, nor the best programmer, but someone who has always been striving after certain things, certain pursuits different from others. Perhaps that is “nature.”
Regrettably, there are still many, many famous program heroes who do not appear in this article, including well-known figures such as Qiu Bojun, Liao Hengyi, Wang Zhidong, Wang Jiangmin, Zhu Chongjun, and so on. Because of time and the length of the article, they will not be introduced one by one here. However, I can tell everyone this: they are all doing very well.
