Location: Volta S.A. R&D Laboratory (Ivry-sur-Seine)
Date: December 1986
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
In the muffled silence of the Ivry laboratory, the cathode ray screen of the Bull computer prototype emitted a spectral green glow.
Behind the keyboard, Karim Belkacem, his features drawn but his eyes shining with indescribable pride, had just pressed the Enter key.
The hard drive scratched for a few seconds. Then, a text was instantly displayed, perfectly fluid.
VOLTA OS v1.0 - SECURE KERNEL
SYSTEM INITIALIZATION... OK.
RSA CRYPTOGRAPHIC MODULE... LOADED.
I386 FPU BYPASS... ACTIVE.
"There you go, Lazarus," Karim whispered, leaning back in his chair with a sigh of relief that bore the weight of a whole year of sleepless nights. "It's stable. Perfectly stable. The operating system intercepts the hardware defect of the Intel processor and corrects it in real time. We ran bank simulations for forty-eight hours non-stop. Not a single crash. Bull's machines are ready to be shipped. We won. »
Around them, the praetorian guard of coders gave way to weary applause. The impossible bet had been met. The Builder had kept his promise to the big boss of Bull: VoltaOS was the absolute shield.
Lazarus stood behind Karim, arms crossed, staring at the screen.
His face, illuminated by the green reflections, betrayed no outpouring of joy. He was looking at the interface. Or rather, the cruel absence of an interface.
The screen showed only a series of stark command lines, framed by simple rectangular blocks of text. No icons, no overlay windows, no sleek mouse cursors. It was a world of mathematicians, raw, arid, hostile to ordinary mortals.
"It's ugly, Karim," Lazarus said coldly in the silence of the laboratory.
The technical director's smile froze. The coders exchanged nervous glances.
"Ugly?" repeated Karim, stung to the quick. "Lazarus is the purest and most complex code ever written in Europe! We have just saved the French IT industry from global bankruptcy! »
"And you did it brilliantly," Lazarus conceded matter-of-factly. "But look at this screen. It's a system for engineers. If we want to replace MS-DOS and the future graphics environments that Microsoft and Apple are preparing in the United States, we need windows. We need drop-down menus, a mouse, typography, light. We need a visual workspace. Here we offer a blind fortress. »
Karim rubbed his face, exasperated by his boss's insatiable demands.
"It's impossible, boss. At least, not on this machine. In order for VoltaOS to be perfectly stable and secure, we had to degrade the visual display as much as possible. The Intel 386 processor is powerful, yes, but it already spends ninety percent of its time calculating our encryption routines and fixing its own hardware errors. If I ask it, in addition, to draw and refresh thousands of pixels on the screen to animate windows, the data bus will choke. The image will stutter, and the processor will crash due to overload. Intel is not designed for graphic art. It is made for sequential logic. We have reached the physical limit of the chip. »
Karim expected Lazare to require them to further optimize the code, to spend extra months scratching milliseconds of execution.
But the young Titan does not react like this. An indefinable grin stretched the corner of his lips.
"You're absolutely right, Karim. The CPU is not made for painting. He is a solitary thinker. He gets exhausted if he has to think and draw at the same time. »
Lazarus turned away from the screen and walked briskly towards his glass-enclosed office.
"Don't move," he ordered.
He disappeared into his office. When he came out a few seconds later, he held in his hands a huge ring binder, stuffed with graph paper and tracing paper.
He walked back to the central bench, swept away the empty coffee cups, and put down the binder with a thud. He opened it.
The engineers approached, intrigued.
What they saw left them speechless. On the hundreds of pages, drawn with a ruler and a pencil line with obsessive precision, were diagrams of silicon architecture. Logic gates, dedicated memory registers, parallel address buses, simplified arithmetic units.
"What is this?" stammered Julien, the team's mathematician, as he adjusted his glasses. "Is it a processor?"
"It's a co-GPU," Lazarus corrected, his black eyes fixed on the diagrams with the tenderness of a father looking at his child.
The sixty-year-old engineer had just pulled out his secret weapon. During his insomnia of the past year, while the rest of the world was sleeping, he had not only waited for his developers to code the OS. He had drawn. In his previous life, Lazarus had spent decades designing the world's most advanced chips. The architecture of a 2D graphics accelerator from the 80s was not for him a breakthrough innovation to be invented with millions of francs of R&D. It was a simple exercise in memory. It was mental archaeology.
"Since the American chip is collapsing under the weight of the image, we're going to transplant a second brain into it," the Builder announced solemnly, tapping the flyleaf of the binder. "A chip designed, engraved and manufactured by Volta S.A., which will fit on the motherboard next to the Intel. It will not calculate complex mathematics. It will have only one function, optimized to the extreme: to manage the display of pixels, the movement of video memory blocks and the drawing of the windows of our OS. It will completely free up the main processor. »
Karim's eyes widened, struck by the magnitude of the proposal.
"Drawing our own chip?! Lazarus, you have gone mad! Giants such as Motorola or Intel take years and tens of millions of dollars to design the architecture of a new silicon component! It's a job for a foundryman, not a coder! The development cost will ruin us even before we have fired the first prototype! »
"The cost of development will be next to zero, Karim," Lazarus said with absolute authority. "Because there's nothing to invent. The architecture is finished. It's in this binder. I solved every bottleneck, every display statement. »
The five geniuses of the code fixed the schemes. To any observer, it was the work of a lifetime, the work of a madman. The circuits were of a rare elegance, almost poetic in their layout. Lazare had relied on the lithography technologies widely available in 1986, adapting the concepts of the future to the manufacturing constraints of the present.
"I don't need a research center of five hundred people," Lazarus said, closing the filing cabinet. "Karim, on Monday morning, you recruited five microelectronics engineers for me. Mask designers, technicians capable of translating my plans on CAD stations for foundries. We will outsource the silicon etching to Taiwan or Eastern Europe for the prototypes, and we will do the final assembly of the boards here, in the Ivry factory, under Castella's nose. »
There was a long silence. The idea of moving from the status of a simple software and enclosure publisher to that of a designer of sovereign microprocessors was dizzying. Volta was about to enter the court of the lords of matter.
"What are you going to call this... this thing? Marc finally asks, hypnotized by the binding of the binder.
Lazarus turned his head towards the large bay window of his office. Through the blinds, he could see the winter sky of the Paris suburbs. But in his mind, he could see the faces of his children.
He thought back to the orphanage in Đà Nẵng. In Linh, the logical and cold mind, the observer unable to act. And to Minh, the rabid textbook, who transformed matter into a visible form. The twins. The two halves of the same system.
The Intel processor was Linh. Cold, logical, but blind without action.
This new chip would be Minh. It would take the invisible calculations and build them as images on a screen.
"She will be called Song," whispered Lazarus.
"Song?" Karim repeated, puzzled. "Is it an acronym?"
"It means 'twin' in Vietnamese," Lazarus explained with a half-smile, his dark eyes shining with a new humanity that his engineers didn't know him had. "Because the computer will never be alone again. The machines of tomorrow will need two brains beating at the same pace to simulate our world. »
The Titan had just given his orders. The Volta empire had just given birth to the first professional graphics accelerator in European history, and it would forever bear the name of its own children.
Location: Council Room, Volta S.A. Factory (Ivry-sur-Seine)
Date: January 1987
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on René Castella and Alexandre de Vigan)
January 1987 threw a polar chill over the Île-de-France, but in the glass-enclosed meeting room overlooking Volta's assembly lines, the atmosphere was electric, almost suffocating.
Around the large oval mahogany table sat the general staff of the empire. René Castella, the production manager, wore his eternal shirt with rolled up sleeves, his arms crossed over his massive chest. Opposite him, Alexandre de Vigan, the sales shark, smoothed the lapel of his double-breasted suit with a studied casualness. Karim Belkacem, with deep dark circles, stood in the background, near the whiteboard.
At the head of the table, Lazare Bonaparte had just finished his speech.
He curtly closed the heavy filing cabinet filled with architectural plans and let silence fill the room. Only the distant hum of the welding machines came through the double glazing.
Castella was the first to break the silence. He stepped forward, placing his big workman's hands on the table, his face reddened with genuine anguish.
"Lazarus... Monsieur Bonaparte. I followed you when we had to modify the V-1 modules in mid-flight. I followed you when we tripled the pace to supply the banks. I manage two hundred and fifty guys at the bottom who assemble motherboards with tin and plastic. But here... You are talking to me about designing and manufacturing a silicon chip! »
The old production manager shook his head, as if trying to dispel a hallucination.
"It's a different job! That's what Intel or Motorola do! Melting silicon requires class 1 clean rooms, lithography lasers that cost tens of millions of dollars per machine, advanced chemists... We're going to ruin ourselves! Volta does not have the infrastructure to compete with Silicon Valley in the field of pure components! »
Alexandre de Vigan nodded slowly, patting his lips with his gold pen. For once, the cynical salesman agreed with the man on the ground.
"René is right on the financial level, Lazare," interposed de Vigan with his usual suavity. "We have a perfect business model . VoltaOS is pure profit margin. We sell floppy disks and software licenses to manufacturers like Bull, and we collect millions without hardware production costs. Why bother with the manufacture of a graphics chip that will reduce our margins and complicate our supply chain? Customers don't care if the screen is a little ugly, as long as the bank accounts are secure. »
Lazarus looked at them both. He saw their fears. These are the fears of businessmen in the 80s, who were used to thinking of IT in two distinct categories: those who make the hardware, and those who make the software.
But the sixty-year-old engineer knew what the following decades would prove. The future belonged to those who merged the two.
"You reason like grocers," Lazarus said in an icy voice, which made Castella start. "Visual austerity is only a temporary tolerance of the market. In the United States, Apple and Microsoft are already preparing complex graphical interfaces. Soon, users will refuse to enter lines of code on a black background. They'll want windows, icons, a virtual desktop. They'll want the machine to simulate a real-world work environment. »
Lazarus put both hands on the Song Project's binder.
"If we leave our operating system in its current state, it will be perceived as an archaic tool for paranoid computer scientists. But if we force the Intel processor to draw these windows, it's going to collapse under the weight of the image. Song is not a whim, gentlemen. It is the second brain that our machines absolutely need in order not to die of obsolescence. »
He turned to Castella.
"Don't worry, René. You are not going to build a clean room in Ivry. I do not intend to spend a single franc on lithography furnaces. The global industry is changing in Taiwan. A company has just been created there. They don't design any chips, they just melt the silicon for the others. They are just technology printers. Karim will send them our engraving masks. They will send us back the finished chips by cargo. Your only mission, René, will be to solder these little chips onto graphics expansion boards right here, with the assembly lines you already master. »
Castella blinked, relieved by the industrial pirouette, but still skeptical.
"What about the design? American engineers took three years to finalize the architecture of such a component... »
"The design is already finished," Lazare cut him in, patting his binder. "I finished it last night."
De Vigan stopped tapping his pen. The shark's smirk disappeared, replaced by the absolute concentration of the predator who has just seen a mountain of meat. He looked at the young CEO with terrified admiration. He understood that the boy had not simply improvised; he was one step ahead of the whole of humanity.
"It's a hardware lock, isn't it?" whispered de Vigan slowly, his eyes widening as he put the pieces of the strategic puzzle together.
Lazare didn't answer, but his dark gaze was anchored in the salesman's.
"My God, it's absolute genius... De Vigan whispered, rising from his chair to pace back and forth. "Bull, Olivetti, Siemens... They are already forced to buy our VoltaOS licenses to get around the hidden defect of the Intel processor. But if VoltaOS needs this famous Song chip to display its superb graphical interface... This means that they are no longer just sold software. »
"Exactly, Alexander," Lazarus confirmed monotonously. "We sell them a closed ecosystem. VoltaOS will only reveal its visual potential on the exclusive condition that a Song graphics card is plugged into the machine. We force them to buy our hardware to run our software. »
"A monopoly with a double trigger," the salesman raved, his hands trembling with excitement. "We control the soul of the machine with the OS, and we control its eyes with the chip. Margins will explode. We're going to charge a premium for the graphics expansion card, and they'll pay, because the interface will be beautiful and smooth. It's the perfect heist. »
Lazarus got up. Volta's staff had just understood. The wall of reluctance had fallen, swept away by the prospect of total industrial domination.
"Karim," the Builder commanded. "Take this binder. Call Taiwan tonight. Find me this new foundry and book their production lines for the next six months. I want the first working prototypes of the Song chip on my desk before spring. René, prepare Line 4 for assembling the graphics cards. Alexandre, start leaking to the European business press that Volta is about to redefine the standard of professional billboards. »
The three men nodded, galvanized by the magnitude of the war that was coming. The Volta Empire had just crossed the Rubicon of material technology.
Lazarus left the meeting room and went to his own office.
He closed the door behind him, cutting off the noise of his lieutenants who were already busy. He approached the bay window, crossed his hands behind his back, and looked out over the inner courtyard of the factory under the gray January sky.
A slight smile, imbued with an unsuspected warmth, stretched his features.
The Song Project. The twin.
A few kilometers away, on Rue d'Assas, Linh must have been calculating geometric trajectories in his notebook, while Minh silently dismantled the family toaster.
In the Titan's mind, industry and blood had definitely come together. The world's computer science was about to adopt the mental structure of its own family. A central brain for the relentless logic of the lookout. And a peripheral brain to sculpt and animate matter under the orders of the Builder.
The chip wasn't just a commercial weapon to destroy Microsoft. It was a monument engraved in silicon, a silent homage by Lazare Bonaparte to the two broken halves of his soul which he had brought back from the monsoon, and which found, through his genius, their echo in the eternity of machines.