Chapter 138: The Queen of Blue and The Keystone

"I'm very excited," Patrick said. "My heart has always been weak, and my doctor told me to avoid getting overly emotional. Unfortunately, I can't do that."

"For the past two years, I've been waiting for this day," Patrick continued. "Sometimes, I feel like my whole life has been a wait for this day."

"I want to thank everyone again, as well as the Umbrella Corporation and my friend—the founder of Umbrella, Morpheus Annon, for giving me this opportunity to be here and share our product with you."

Patrick became somewhat emotional, and the audience timely provided applause and a few cheers of encouragement.

"About two years ago, when Morpheus told me he decided to venture into the electronics field, to be honest, I thought he had lost his mind."

"I said, 'NO, you can't be serious.'"

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

"I said, 'NO!'"

"He said, 'Yes!'"

"I said, 'We're going to fail.'"

"He said, 'No, we have to make this work.'"

"We argued for a long time, after all, everyone knows that the Umbrella Corporation is a pharmaceutical company. We've produced the world's best trauma treatment drugs, but electronics is not our forte."

"If you're injured, even if it's a nerve injury, our medication can heal you, but it can't fix a computer!"

"So I asked him, 'Why? Why enter the electronics field? Why is this necessary?'"

"Morpheus convinced me with one sentence."

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

The venue fell silent for a moment, then erupted into applause. Putting these words into the context of internet companies two or three decades later, they might seem commonplace, but coming from Patrick at this moment, they were deeply moving.

When the applause subsided, Patrick said, "Allow me to introduce to you our product that we are proud of, a personal computer that will change the world. The Queen of Blue!"

As his words fell, the screen filled with deep blue color suddenly gathered towards the central position of the Umbrella Corporation logo, merging into the icon, which was then dyed with deep blue and light blue, changing from its original red and white to an umbrella shape interlaced with deep and light blue.

Then, each segment of the icon disappeared clockwise, and as the last segment vanished, a silver-gray computer appeared on the screen.

The silver-gray mainframe, resembling a super-modern skyscraper, had three vertical metal frames at the front with a hollow grid, devoid of any other decoration except for a blue Umbrella logo button as the power switch.

The slim LCD monitor was also very clean and sleek, with rounded edges and a minimalist design, with only an Umbrella logo as the switch on the front.

The dynamic display continued for half a minute.

Then Patrick spoke again, "In this computer, we have poured in the world-leading six technologies: a large high-resolution LCD monitor, a groundbreaking 64-bit chip—Silver Dragon No. 1, a new architecture memory: Mana, an independent graphics processor—Blue Dragon graphics card, our own next-generation desktop system: Keystone, and a combination of a super-large solid-state drive and a high-speed mechanical hard drive, etc."

"Before going into the specifics, I'd like to first give you a demonstration of this computer."

He spoke, and a staff member came up with a display stand, on which was placed the "Queen of Blue."

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

Instantly, the pitch-black screen lit up, followed by the blue Umbrella logo appearing in the center of the black screen. Eight alternating segments disappeared and reappeared clockwise, visually indicating the system was loading.

However, just two or three seconds later, the loading animation abruptly stopped, and the screen suddenly brightened, revealing an extremely clear and simple desktop in front of everyone.

The venue fell utterly silent for a moment.

"We use a high-speed solid-state drive to load the system, allowing the Queen of Blue to boot in just three seconds," Patrick explained in a timely manner.

"What you're seeing now is our own desktop system: Keystone."

"When designing this system, Morpheus set several principles for the project manager, Bob Henderson."

"First, the desktop system is the keystone connecting hardware and software applications. As a middleware, it must have portability and a modular structure, enabling flexible support for more hardware environments."

"Currently, besides supporting our own hardware, the Keystone system also supports most CPUs, memories, and other hardware on the market."

"However, because the Keystone system was developed according to our next-generation hardware standards, it can only provide limited functions when using underperforming hardware."

Hearing this, Intel's Paul Otellini frowned, feeling an ominous premonition.

"Morpheus's second principle to Bob was: to ensure user experience, it must be compatible with enough software."

"Based on the development manuals of several partners, we have optimized the Keystone system to the greatest extent, making it downward compatible with most software in environments of Windows, Linux, Unix, and other partners."

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer also frowned.

"The third principle is that the Keystone system must have unprecedented ease of use, allowing anyone who has never used it to become familiar with most of its operations immediately."

"For this, we adopted a polymorphic interaction mechanism, fully considering from the users' perspective, eliminating all cluttered instructions, and returning the exploration rights of system functions to the users. This button..."

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

Hearing this, Paul and Steve Ballmer both looked towards Steve Jobs in the distance.

It's well known that simplifying and focusing on user experience has always been the most advocated product philosophy by Jobs.

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

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

Gradually, the venue buzzed with conversations, occasionally punctuated by exclamations of surprise.

Suddenly, someone from the audience shouted, "How many frames are your animations running at?"

Patrick glanced over and saw it was Steve Ballmer, "All animations in the Keystone system run at 60 frames."

"How is that possible, with such high image resolution, if everything is 60 frames, wouldn't there be frame drops and stuttering? How do you allocate performance? Are you using all the memory for displaying animations? How did you solve this problem?"

Patrick smiled, "You've hit the nail on the head, friend from our competitor."

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

"What?"

Steve Ballmer was astonished, "Are you joking?"

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

"If we had a well of water, would we care about a few drops spilling out?"

"Umbrella Corporation doesn't want to compromise user experience over a few drops of water. Our solution is to dig a well."

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