Location: Equipment laboratory, Volta S.A. factory (Ivry-sur-Seine)
Date: August 1989
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
The sweltering heat of late August crashed into the tin roofs of the Ivry-sur-Seine industrial zone, but inside Volta S.A.'s hardware lab, the air conditioning maintained a surgical cold. The air smelled of ozone, cold coffee and welding resin.
Back from his secret odyssey in Taiwan, where he had just sealed a massive production pact with Morris Chang and the fledgling TSMC factory, Lazare Bonaparte immediately returned to his place at the heart of his factory. Unaware of the reverse engineering plots that were brewing at the same time in the basement of the Pentagon, the sixty-year-old engineer was serenely preparing for the next stage of his war: the invasion of homes.
Standing in front of a large luminous table covered with lithographic tracing papers, Lazarus listened to his father.
Auguste Bonaparte, dressed in a light grey suit, held a production cost slip in his hand. The former senior civil servant had taken charge of the financial viability of the company with the same rigour that he once applied to the state's funds.
"The agreement with Taiwan is a logistical feat, Lazarus," Augustus conceded, tapping the paper with his pen. "The fact that TSMC agrees to melt our chips into white label solves our volume problem. But we have a mathematical problem. »
Lazarus did not raise his head from his tracings. "Enlighten me."
"That's the cost of silicon," his father explained. "The VESLA-II processor that we sell to the DGA and the Kourou Space Center is a masterpiece, but its matrix is huge. With current engraving yields, producing just one of these chips costs almost a thousand dollars. This is perfectly acceptable for a military waiter billed for a hundred thousand francs. But you told me you wanted to sell a family computer. »
"I want to flood the American civilian market with a machine sold for less than three thousand dollars," Lazarus confirmed in a placid voice.
"Then it's impossible," Auguste said. "You can't fit a thousand-dollar processor into a three-thousand-dollar machine. With the cost of the case, the color screen, the RAM, the hard drive and the distribution margins, we will sell at a loss. The VESLA-II is a Formula 1 engine. You don't put that in a family sedan. »
"You are perfectly right," replied Lazarus, stepping away from the lighted table.
He grabbed a large cardboard tube from a corner, pulled out a new roll of graph paper, and unrolled it over the VESLA diagrams.
"That's why the civilian market won't have the VESLA-II. I put him on a diet. Let me introduce you to the V-1000. »
Karim Belkacem, who was half dozing on a high stool with a cup of warm coffee in his hand, sat up abruptly. The head of the software division approached the light table, blinking behind his thick glasses.
On paper, the logical scheme of the chip was much smaller, tighter.
"Have you planed the architecture?" asked Karim, suddenly very awake.
"I amputated the monster so that it would be profitable to mass-produce," Lazarus explained, tracing the outlines with the eraser of his pencil. "I halved the Level 1 cache. I removed two parallel execution paths on the superscalar architecture. And I lowered the clock speed by twenty percent so that the chip could be encapsulated in a cheap plastic case without melting, instead of our military ceramic. »
Augustus studied the new calculations of the engraving area inscribed in the margin.
"The size of the chip is halved... murmured the former ENARCH, mentally calculating. "On a silicon wafer, the yield will explode. The cost of production falls below two hundred dollars a piece. It's viable. Very viable. But Lazarus... Will this bridled chip still be powerful enough to beat the Americans? »
Lazarus let out a slight laugh, cold and devoid of humor.
"Dad, even with a severed leg and a missing lung, this chip is still pure RISC. The V-1000 still calculates three times faster than the current best Intel 386, and it will humiliate the Macintosh 68030 processor. For a desktop computer, it is a weapon of mass destruction. »
"There's a problem, though, Lazarus," Karim chimed in, his tone suddenly serious.
The young software engineer set the characteristics of the reduced cache memory. He had just understood the direct impact that this material decision was going to have on his own department.
"Kourou and the military are content with a command-line interface," Karim recalled, running a nervous hand through his dark curls. "But for the general public, you demanded a complete graphical interface. Windows, icons, smooth animations, high-resolution color. All of this consumes a lot of resources. »
"Exactly," Lazarus agreed, staring intently at him.
"Until now," Karim continued, feeling the sweat creeping down his forehead, "we were coding with the assurance that the brute force of the VESLA-II would catch up with our heaviness. If you limit the equipment with this V-1000, we no longer have this safety net. »
"That's the principle of engineering, Karim. Optimization," Lazarus said, his tone becoming that of a master demanding the impossible from his disciples. "Microsoft and Apple developers are writing heavy, fragmented code, and they're praying that Intel will release bigger chips to compensate for their software laziness. We won't do that. »
Lazarus approached his chief developer, placing a steady hand on his shoulder.
"The equipment has made its diet to lower the price. Now it's up to the software to sweat. I want the VoltaOS interface to be optimized down to the instruction. I want it to run on the V-1000 so smoothly, so liquid, that the user feels like they're physically touching the windows on their screen. If a piece of code takes you three clock cycles, rewrite it so that it only takes one. »
Karim swallowed. It was a mammoth job. Optimizing system code to this level of granularity was a matter of algorithmic goldsmithing. But he also knew that this was the only way to create the magic that Lazarus demanded.
"Okay," Karim whispered. "We're going to rewrite the window manager in pure assembler to short-circuit the kernel. It will be fluid. »
"That's not all," Lazarus added as he walked to the lab door, beckoning Karim to follow him. "A fluid system is useless if it has nothing to run. Come to the Bunker with me. It's time to give our civilian computer a reason to be bought. »
Location: The developers' open-space ("The Bunker"), Volta S.A. factory
Date: August 1989
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
To access Volta's software department, you had to walk down half a level below the main plant, through a digicode fire door, and enter what the entire company affectionately called "The Bunker."
It was a vast, open-plan space, plunged into permanent darkness. The only real source of light came from the bluish glow of dozens of cathode ray monitors lined up on long trestle tables. The air was saturated with the hum of hard drives, the frenetic clatter of mechanical keyboards, and the nagging smell of cold coffee and brown tobacco.
Lazare Bonaparte's praetorian guard worked here: about twenty developers, system architects and cryptography specialists, selected by Karim Belkacem from among the brightest and most marginal minds in French engineering schools.
When Lazarus entered, flanked by Karim, the noise of the keyboards gradually diminished until it died out completely. The pale faces, lit by the lines of code, turned to the young Chairman and CEO.
Lazarus walked to the center of the room, near a large whiteboard covered with crossed-out UNIX kernel trees. He took a marker, erased a memory allowance equation with a broad gesture, and turned to his troops.
"Gentlemen," Lazare began, his voice clear and composed, echoing in the silence of the Bunker. "You have performed a miracle with VoltaOS. You have coded a kernel capable of running the military and space infrastructure of a nuclear power without a single flaw. The State is grateful to you, and I am grateful to you. »
He paused, letting his gaze sweep over the tired but proud faces of his engineers.
"But the army is only a niche market," he said abruptly, breaking the moment of self-satisfaction. "The real war, the one that will define the next century, will not be won in the missile bunkers. It will be won on secretaries' desks, in architectural firms, in students' rooms and in bank branches. It will be won on the civilian market. And for that, a perfect operating system is not enough. »
Lazarus wrote two words in black capital letters on the whiteboard: KILLER APP.
"People don't buy a computer to admire an operating system," Lazarus explained with the cold pedagogy of a strategist. "They buy it because a specific application has become essential to them. For Apple II, it was the VisiCalc spreadsheet. For the IBM PC, it's Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect. Today, Bill Gates is trying to lock down this market with his own software on the Macintosh and soon on Windows. We are not going to let him do it. »
He erased the two words and drew three large squares side by side.
"We're not just going to sell them a computer. We're going to sell them the absolute digital factory. As of today, you are putting military cryptography on hold. Le Bunker is exclusively dedicated to the development of our own office suite natively integrated with VoltaOS. Its code name is V-Office. »
Murmurs ran through the open space. Taking on the American software giants required armies of developers.
" V-Office will consist of three pillars," Lazarus said, pointing to each square of the marker. "A word processor. A spreadsheet. Visual presentation software. And they need to crush competition on two fundamental issues that will redefine the industry. The first point is absolute WYSIWYG. What You See Is What You Get. »
A developer at the back of the room raised his hand. "Microsoft and Apple are already doing it, boss. Fonts appear on the screen as they do on paper. »
"They are pretending to do it," Lazarus said. "Their fonts are raster, pixelated, and the final print rendering depends on the disastrous drivers of the printers. I want native vector font management directly integrated into the graphic core of VoltaOS. I want the user to be able to zoom in four hundred percent on a letter without seeing a single square pixel. What's on the screen should be the perfect mathematical reflection of what will come out of the laser printer. No control codes, no tags. Pure typography. »
He turned to Karim, who was listening religiously, taking notes in a notebook.
"And here's the second point, Karim. That's where you're going to kill Microsoft. This is dynamic integration. »
Lazarus drew two-way arrows between the three squares on the painting.
"On Windows or Mac OS, applications are autistic," explained the architect of the future, diving into the technique. "If a user creates a pie chart in Excel and wants to put it in a Word report, they have to copy it, paste it like a dead image. If he changes a number in his spreadsheet, he has to start the whole operation over again to update his text. It's archaic. This is an insult to IT. »
The silence in the Bunker thickens. The developers were beginning to understand the magnitude of the mountain that Lazarus was asking them to climb.
"Our core handles real preemptive multitasking," Lazare continued, his eyes shining with absolute technical intensity. "You're going to use this foundation to build bridges of inter-process communication. If a user inserts a V-Calc chart into a V-Word report, I don't want it to be a static image. I want this to be an active viewing window plugged directly into the spreadsheet. »
He stepped forward, mimicking the action on an imaginary keyboard.
"The user has his text report open on the left half of the screen, and his spreadsheet on the right half. If they change an income statement line in the spreadsheet, I want the chart embedded in the text document to redraw, animate, and update in real time, right in front of their eyes, without them having to click on anything. The V-1000 's mathematical processor will take care of the calculations, the operating system will handle messaging between software. »
A shiver ran down Karim's spine. What Lazare described, this absolute fluidity of data through applications, was science fiction in 1989. It was a software symbiosis that required total control of the code, from the hardware layer to the graphical interface.
"Boss... A system architect chimed in, his voice trembling with excitement and apprehension. "If you can code that fluidity with a sleek graphical interface... Microsoft will look like it is selling mechanical typewriters. We're going to make them look old-fashioned in a second. But... How do you sell it? IBM and Compaq will never pre-install VoltaOS and V-Office. Bill Gates blackmailed them with the MS-DOS license. They will block our access to the material market. Even though our software is divine, no one will see it. »
Lazarus' gaze hardens. A cold, almost predatory smile stretched her lips. He placed the marker on the edge of the painting.
"That's a great question. And that's why I went to Chicago this summer. »
Lazarus sat down on the edge of an unoccupied desk, crossing his arms. The bluish light of the screens sculpted the shadows of his face, giving him the aura of a general preparing an ambush on a global scale.
"I didn't just go there to audit our competitors' machines. I went there to find our Trojan horse. And I found it. I met with Jerry Sanders, the founder and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices. »
A few stunned whispers arose. AMD was, along with Intel, one of the sacred pillars of Silicon Valley, the beating heart of the American semiconductor industry.
"AMD is losing its legal war against Intel," Lazare revealed, sharing the industrial state secret with his engineers. "Sanders is cornered. It needs revolutionary technology to survive. I showed him our abilities. I proposed to him a shadow covenant, and he accepted it with the greed of a drowning man. »
The sixty-year-old engineer detailed the Drake Hotel pact with surgical precision.
"When the time comes, we will not sell our computer ourselves. We will license the V-1000 architecture to AMD. Sanders will manufacture our chip in its American foundries. It will flood the market with the fastest and cheapest processor in the world. But there will be a leonine condition in its sales contracts: any manufacturer that wants to buy AMD's miracle chip will have to pre-install VoltaOS and V-Office. MS-DOS and Windows will be contractually prohibited on our machines. »
The breath was taken away in the Bunker. The developers, used to coding in the shadows, had just realized that they were the architects of a global coup d'état. Lazare was not going to face Microsoft head-on; it was going to use its own American industry, its own factories and its own distribution channels to inoculate its system into the veins of Silicon Valley.
"It's brilliant... Karim murmured, stunned by the cynicism and strategic perfection of the plan. "Sanders is going to force the industry to swallow our software to save its own head against Intel."
"Exactly," Lazarus confirmed. "We have the equipment. We impose the software. It was total encirclement. »
He rose, his expression once again becoming absolutely severe. It was no longer a time for rejoicing, but for execution.
"However, this plan only works if our product is unassailable. The V-1000 is a processor that is limited compared to the VESLA. If V-Office crashes, if the interface jerks in front of Jerry Sanders or in front of the American press, the illusion will collapse. We have no room for error. Not a single bug. Not a single latency. »
Lazarus advanced in the midst of his men, laying down the rules of engagement.
"That's why we're not going to call AMD tomorrow morning. We are not going to launch mass production blindly. I ordered our Taiwanese foundry to produce only a pre-series of five hundred V-1000 chips. With these five hundred chips, we are going to assemble here in Ivry five hundred prototypes of the Volta personal computer. »
He pointed to the whole room.
"These machines will not be sold. They will be distributed. Over to you. To the factory administration. To the engineers of the DGA. We are going to launch a full-scale test phase. A dogfooding of absolute violence. In the coming months, you will use these prototypes to work, to code, to write. You're going to torture architecture. You'll saturate the cache memory of the throttled chip to see how the kernel reacts. »
The CEO clapped his hands, a popping sound that startled a few coders.
"I want a systematic hunt for memory leaks. If Word opens in more than a second, you rewrite the allocation algorithm. If the Excel-related chart stutters during refresh, you rethink the software data bus. The interface must become an extension of the user's nervous system. It must be organic. Infallible. »
Lazarus walked towards the door of the Bunker, turning around one last time before passing through the secure airlock.
"The revolution will not come from Silicon Valley, gentlemen. She was born here, in this cellar in Ivry-sur-Seine. Optimize your code. When these five hundred machines run with the perfection of a Swiss atomic clock, I will pick up my phone and call California. And that day... We will sign the death warrant for our competitors. At work. »
The heavy fire door closed with a pneumatic whistle.
Silence reigned for a few seconds in the open space. The weight of responsibility, the titanic scale of the project and the terrifying vision of victory were mixed in the minds of the engineers. They had just understood that they were no longer just employees of a successful French technology company. They were the soldiers of an invisible invading army.
Karim Belkacem took a deep breath. He cracked the knuckles of his fingers, sat down in front of his UNIX terminal, and opened the command-line text editor.
"You heard it," Karim said to the crowd, his voice charged with a new adrenaline. "No more playing with the military. Clear the cache of your endpoints. Open new repositories. We're going to code a word processor that will make Bill Gates cry. »
In an ensemble movement that was almost like military choreography, the twenty mechanical keyboards of the Bunker began to rattle frantically again. The green and amber code lines began to scroll across the cathode ray screens at breakneck speed.
Unaware that on the other side of the Atlantic, the American government had just decided to steal their architecture to save Intel, Volta's engineers blindly forged the replica. A purely software replica, undetectable by the CIA's spy satellites, but endowed with such destructive power that no Pentagon subsidy could ever stop it.
The Volta personal computer had just entered its final gestation phase. The war for the future of digital humanity was accelerating, and the countdown to the first major civil clash was officially on.