Chapter 5: Some Preparations

After becoming the first owner of the Plane Ring—well, Comrade Wang Fan preferred to call it the Master of the Plane Ring, while simultaneously referring to the extra-planar intelligent lifeform as "Butler"—the intelligent lifeform had to accept the title by default, despite its serious protests and Comrade Wang Fan's stubborn, pedantic tendency to dig his heels in.

"Butler, we are in the same boat now. What is the first step?"

"First, you must provide me with data regarding your interconnection principles, rule construction, binary, assembly language, and other related fields. You will browse, and I will memorize. Only then can I analyze and produce the control source code, using your hands to program and send it into the Net. Meanwhile, to ensure security, I suggest you move out of this shared apartment and rent a place of your own. This will make it easier to act without being discovered due to unexpected anomalies. Furthermore, based on Earth's current transportation environment, I suggest you learn to drive. In the future, if you need to procure supplies, you will certainly need to travel back and forth to contact warehouses and such; if you do not drive and instead hire others, it will be very easy to expose the ring's abnormalities."

"Alright, then I'll sign up for a driving school first, and then use Baidu to search for the origins, principles, development, and programming knowledge of the Internet."

"Considering there is only about 10,000 yuan in your savings account, I suggest you work for another two months. Once I am able to control the shadow clients and generate income, you may then resign."

"You even know how much money I have saved? Doesn't that mean I have no privacy left?"

"Rest assured, this was all obtained from the initial memory extraction. Now that you possess the Plane Ring, it is impossible for me to obtain any new information without your permission."

"That's more like it," Wang Fan muttered.

And so, Comrade Wang Fan returned to his life as a reclusive shut-in. However, his after-work routine changed from browsing Net videos and appreciating the martial arts films of Japan's Teacher Cang to studying the basic knowledge of the Internet. Internet technology is an information technology developed and built upon the foundation of computer technology; to put it literally, it relies on the development of electronic computers. Starting from the invention of the Turing Machine by British mathematician A.M. Turing in 1936, theoretical preparations were made for modern computer hardware and software. The first practical application occurred in 1942 with the successful development of the world's first electronic computer, the ABC, which utilized 300 vacuum tubes and binary code; its basic architecture was virtually identical to modern computers. In 1945, the father of modern computing, John von Neumann, first proposed the concept of the stored-program computer, known as the "Von Neumann machine." On February 10, 1946, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was born. Equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighing a total of 30 tons, it cost nearly $500,000. It was the world's first multi-purpose, all-electronic digital computer, capable of performing several thousand multiplications per minute. On December 23, 1947, Bell Telephone Laboratories in the United States invented the world's first transistor. Computers entered the transistor era. In 1952, Grace Hopper outlined the blueprint for the first "compiler," which translated all programs into machine language before execution, making a significant contribution to the commercialization of computers. Then, as technology progressed and computers became faster and faster, the world's first integrated circuit appeared in 1959. In 1969, Bell Labs developed the first multi-tasking, multi-user time-sharing computer system using assembly language, which people regard as the beginning of the Internet. In 1974, the U.S. Department of Defense developed TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). Intel released the 8080 microprocessor, which became the first industrial standard product for local area networks. In 1976, Hayes released the first... In 1988, the first transatlantic submarine communication fiber optic cable system (TAT-8) was successfully laid. In 1990, the era of commercialization began.

Although Yadi Blue was merely a fragment of memory, strangely enough, it possessed learning capabilities. Once it understood assembly language and C++, it began to pivot toward low-level Internet development. The security, performance, load, and OS-independence of this field made Wang Fan's mouth foam at the complexity, but for the sake of the silver, Wang Fan endured. He leafed through countless Net library materials and fed it books like "API Programming." After three months, Yadi Blue compiled a package and sent it to the Internet via the cloud. The rest was just waiting a few months for the fruits to bear. (I don't understand computer technology very well, so please understand that this part is just to reasonably facilitate making money; the focus of this book is not making money, but traveling through time to change history.)

Soon, six months passed. During this time, Wang Fan resigned from his job, leaving the company with a sense of style amidst the "lingering" gazes of his financial manager and supervisor. He found a suitable apartment for himself through 68.com; it was a one-bedroom, one-living-room unit located in a somewhat remote area on the outskirts of the city, but the surroundings were quiet, with large areas of warehouses and factories nearby for rent, which perfectly suited Wang Fan's goal of staying low-profile. The rent was 1,000 yuan a month. He learned to drive; with a 4,000-yuan "offering," the driving instructor spent two months helping Wang Fan master the essence of driving, excelling in both theory and practice, making him ready for the road—though, of course, he didn't have a car yet. He went to various banks to open as many as 30 savings cards to facilitate future transfers and withdrawals.

Finally, when Wang Fan logged onto the Net, opened the controller interface, sent the transfer commands, and saw tens of millions of yuan being transferred into each of his savings cards, he cried tears of happiness: I do not seek eternity, only that I once possessed it.

I'm rich! I'm rich! I don't even know how to spend it! I'll buy a house—I'll buy a whole set! I'll buy a car—I'll buy a whole fleet! We common folk, we're gonna be happy today! We common folk, we're gonna be happy today!