Sim Won Hu

Sim Won Hu was born in Malaya in 1955 . Subsequently, he moved to Singapore , where he graduated from the Faculty of Electronic Engineering at the ^[1] .

In July 1981, ^[1] Hu and his classmate Eun Kai Wa opened a small workshop in Singapore. The company, originally named Creative , was involved in the maintenance and repair of computers. In parallel with fixing the computer, Hu was engaged in his own development and created an additional memory module for the then popular Apple II machines, which began to be in high demand.

The first major success of Hu and Creative was the creation of a sound system on one chip, the prototype of modern sound cards , in 1986 . Prior to this invention, in personal computers, the so-called “PC speakers” were responsible for sound signals, which could produce only one sound at a certain point in time. The new device became the first of its kind device for personal computers, capable of processing complex sound effects and playing music in stereo mode ^[2] .

In 1992, on the basis of their own development , Creative specialists , under Hu's leadership, created the Sound Blaster 16 sound card ^[3] , which became the standard of sound systems for personal computers for many years. Today , Creative produces a series of sound cards under this brand (for example, semi-professional Sound Blaster Audigy or, designed to work with modern computer games, Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality ^[4] ). Creative to this day remains one of the largest manufacturers of sound cards for PCs.

In 2002, at the age of 45, Sim Won Hu became Singapore's youngest billionaire. His achievements were marked in the homeland with two awards "Businessman of the Year", which he was awarded in 1992 and 1997 ^[5] .

• When writing this article, we used material ( text in Wikisource ) from Lentapedia , available under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Unported license .