Yes, in today's laser phototypesetting workshop, you can't hear the monotonous click and rumble of typewriters, and you can't see the lead melting furnace filled with poisonous fog and the dense typesetting racks. After you input the manuscript into the computer, you can send it through Founder's editing system, and then arrange the title, words and pictures instantly through the skillful hands of editors, and you can add, delete and modify it at will and conveniently. Then input the assembled layout into the laser phototypesetting host, and you can output a film exactly the same as the newspaper layout. Send the film to the plate-making workshop to make PS version, and hang it on the printing machine for mass printing.
Fortunately, when I first set foot in journalism, I caught up with and benefited from an epoch-making revolution in Chinese character printing and the spread of Chinese civilization triggered by Wang Xuan and his partners. As luck would have it, I was assigned by the leaders to sort out the abstracts of science and technology soon after I came to Science and Technology Daily, and I did two jobs related to Mr. Wang Xuan: First, I rewrote Wang Xuan's biography into nine short articles and serialized it in the newspaper with the title "Farewell to the struggle between lead and fire-Wang Xuan's story"; The second is to cooperate with a disciple sent by Wang Xuan to study the feasibility of intelligent typesetting. It was during the spring and summer of 1993 that I got to know Wang Xuan and his achievements earlier and appreciate his unique charm, although I never had a face-to-face conversation with him.
I remember three years ago, I saw Wang Xuan answering a reporter's question on TV. I said: My grades are not in the front 10. But at every critical moment in my life, there seems to be an insight that helps me choose the right development direction. This insight is the most advantageous ability in my life.
Wang Xuan once joked that he was "as the name suggests", and he was "choosing" all his life, with nine choices throughout his life; What stimulated or supported him was two thorns and a dream of 10. It is very stinging that, more than 50 years after liberation, China has no independent and open civilian high-tech industry except rockets and satellites. The second sting is that there are many China people in the world's high-tech enterprises, but China companies have failed to occupy a place in the top 100 in the world. However, I think what makes Wang Xuan feel gratified is that he made nine important choices in his life, which enabled him to realize at least five dreams in his lifetime.
According to Wang Xuan himself, when he was 24 years old in 196 1, he made the most important decision in his life, that is, stepping into software from hardware and doing research combining the two. Cross-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary backgrounds merged together, which made Wang Xuan suddenly enlightened, found the source of creativity, and generate showed the spark of creativity. "Many new ideas have been put forward." This is the decisive factor for Wang Xuan to undertake the development of laser phototypesetting system later, and it also verifies the words of Weiner, the founder of cybernetics: the blank areas between established disciplines are the easiest to achieve fruitful results.
The fourth important choice made by Wang Xuan in 1975 is to engage in the phototypesetting project that determines his life. At that time, he was still a nobody. With the ridicule of "playing deceptive mathematical games", he adopted a unique technical approach, that is, skipping the second-generation phototypesetting system popular in Japan and the third-generation phototypesetting system popular in the United States, and directly studying the fourth-generation laser phototypesetting system that has not been commercialized abroad, and finally realized the leap-forward innovation and development.
What makes people feel is that Wang Xuan has never been confused by poverty and interests. He is confident but not conceited, persistent but not rigid. When the road is long and blank, he faces the difficulties and chooses to be self-reliant and innovative; When he is in a high position and his reputation is getting bigger and bigger, he is willing to be a ladder, choose invisibility and cultivate new talents ... He has made wise and far-sighted choices again and again, which has led him to success, Excellence and loftiness. "Half a lifetime of hard work, a lifetime of peace of mind" (Wang Xuan's wife Oscar Chan? ? Dedicated to my husband), as his best portrayal!