Chapter 135: Stairs
Chapter 135: Stairs
After work, Insu was web surfing at home. It was partly to check the reactions to the services he had developed and launched, such as WET, WPAT, and TLF Online, but it was also because, like any ordinary user, he simply wondered what was on the internet these days.
‘It’s still damn slow.’
When he invested in Comcast earlier, he had asked them to begin cable internet service in LA as soon as possible, but this turned out to be harder than expected.
The infrastructure itself was not the problem. The cable networks were already laid, and from Comcast’s perspective, they also wanted to start service in a large city with many potential customers, so they had already installed backbone networks to some extent.
The biggest problem was city administration and regulations.
They could not easily enter because they were caught up in negotiations with local communities, contracts for public facility usage fees, city council approval, and monopoly contracts held by existing companies.
Of course, Comcast could not give up on such a delicious chunk of meat as LA, so they were still aggressively attacking the market, but it was unavoidable that it would take time.
Still, he had already received forecasts and promises that it would be possible within one or two years, so it seemed he would not have to endure for too long.
“Oh. Pentium II!”
(Translator’s Notes: Pentium II — Intel’s CPU line released in 1997, succeeding the Pentium Pro and widely used in late-1990s personal computers and servers.)
While surfing around, Insu found news that a new CPU would be released. It had a different name in this world, but judging from its specifications and functions, it was exactly the Pentium II he remembered.
To Insu, it was welcome news.
It was not only because he could develop games with higher performance requirements. This Pentium II was a processor that had a massive influence on computer adoption.
Its greatest advantage and defining characteristic was that it was cheap. Of course, when Pentium II first came out, it was a new product, so it was more expensive than Pentium I at the time, but it was far cheaper than Pentium I had been at launch.
Pentium I’s launch price had been in the high 800-dollar range, while Pentium II was in the low 600-dollar range. Moreover, since there had been four years of inflation and economic growth between them, the price difference felt by actual consumers was even greater.
Not only that, but Pentium II had an external L2 cache. L2 cache itself had already been used as a performance-improvement method in the previous version, Pentium Pro, but Pentium II attached the L2 cache outside the chip, lowering the manufacturing difficulty of the chip itself.
(Translator’s Notes: L2 cache — Level 2 cache, a memory layer used by CPUs to speed up access to frequently used data.)
(Translator’s Notes: Pentium Pro — Intel CPU released in 1995, aimed mainly at servers and high-end workstations.)
At the same time, this made it possible to create Celeron, a lower-tier CPU that reduced cost by removing the L2 cache while slightly lowering performance.
(Translator’s Notes: Celeron — Intel’s budget CPU line, introduced as a lower-cost alternative to Pentium-class processors.)
This, too, was a strategy that had a massive influence on computer adoption. Even if Celeron performed worse than Pentium II, it still performed better than Pentium I and could run most ordinary programs.
Moreover, because computers were advancing rapidly at the time, a huge amount of content had already accumulated. If one gave up on the newest things, and if one was a casual user, Celeron was enough.
‘And this also became an important turning point not only for individual users, but for businesses that needed massive computer environments.’
It was a simple matter. Individual users only needed to buy one unit no matter how expensive it was, but for internet businesses that needed to build large-scale servers, even a slight difference in unit price created an enormous gap in total cost.
Moreover, since this processor was developed for mass adoption, Intel also had plenty of room to provide benefits such as additional discounts to large-scale buyers.
After all, that helped their goal of selling many units, and the higher production volume became, the lower the unit cost could go.
‘I should tell Dad. Or maybe he already knows?’
Insu tilted his head and sent a message through WTALK.
[Yeah. I saw it too. That’s why I’m thinking of delaying server expansion for a bit.]
[Ah. That’s a relief.]
Even now, Parallel Soft was still actively increasing its servers. Since the internet was still in the middle of spreading, Parallel Soft, which held a dominant influence over the American internet, was growing along with it.
In any case, it was fortunate that his father already knew. Relieved, Insu continued searching for game-related information.
“Oh… this site is cool.”
It was a console fan site. On the opening screen, when he pressed enter, a JavaScript animation played, showing a cartridge being inserted into the large console displayed on the page. Below it was a visitor counter, which was popular at the time.
The numbers increasing might seem like nothing, but before JavaScript, applying this kind of real-time change had been impossible.
When he entered the site, a melody played through a MIDI file.
(Translator’s Notes: MIDI — Musical Instrument Digital Interface. A format and protocol that stores musical performance data rather than actual recorded audio, allowing small file sizes.)
Sure enough, now that there were many users, homepage creators had begun trying all kinds of things to differentiate themselves. But there were still limits.
No matter how full of ideas they were, internet speed itself was limited, so low-resolution simple images and MIDI files were the best they could do.
The internal content was nothing special either. Most of it was simply filled with text.
It seemed there was still more time needed before the true internet era arrived.
The biggest disappointment was naturally video.
‘YouTube.’
The absolute powerhouse of the future internet was, of course, YouTube. No matter how much text and images developed and became sophisticated, they could not beat the immersion and communicative power of video.
Honestly, even if most people from 2025 fell into the past, they would live fairly contentedly as long as YouTube was properly available.
But that was still far too distant. Nearly ten years remained before YouTube would appear, and for content to be properly produced, smartphones had to develop to some extent. Time was also needed for content to accumulate and related industries to develop.
Even if he knew the future, he could not fly into the sky all at once. First, he had to find the stairs in between.
‘What could serve as those stairs, those stepping stones?’
As Insu thought this and continued web surfing, something caught his eye.
It was a popular music-related site. It was an American site filled with discussion about various music genres, but perhaps because it was made by an ordinary individual, it felt somewhat messy.
As background music, it played a MIDI melody recreating a currently popular rock song. Naturally, there were no lyrics.
MIDI did not store actual music. It only contained sheet music. Then a computer played it through virtual instruments or a synthesizer. Thanks to that, its file size was very small, allowing it to be used even in this era, when internet speeds were extremely slow.
‘If this were 2025, there would have been music play buttons everywhere.’
It was a music-related site, but aside from the background music, it only had lyrics, singer photos, and CD covers, which felt somewhat regrettable.
Then, while searching for links to other sites for surfing, he found an unexpected menu on one page.
[Sharing music!]
At first, he thought they were sharing MIDI files. Since MIDI files only contained sheet music, their size was small, measured in kilobytes, so they could be downloaded without much burden even in this era.
“Huh?! This is already out?”
But the filename in the archive was different from what he expected.
[Midnight Echoes.mp3]
It was an mp3 file.
He knew this had come out in the 1990s, but he did not expect someone to have already made a file and shared it like this.
Reading the text below, it said the file had been extracted from a CD using a program, so it seemed they had ripped it themselves.
And kindly, they had also linked places to download the codec and playback program.
It was not a song he particularly liked, but because seeing mp3 felt both welcome and fascinating, he downloaded it first. The codec and player were very small. The playback program was around 300 kilobytes, and the codec was around 500 kilobytes, so even with the current internet, they finished quickly.
However, the mp3 file itself was quite large.
It was 4 megabytes, and it took around fifteen minutes.
‘~♪~♪’
When he played it, music came out properly.
Insu listened quietly for a while. Come to think of it, it had truly been a long time since he listened to a proper song on a computer, one with a human voice and instruments that did not feel like electronic sounds.
In truth, even before this, there had been several music file formats, including WAV. But they were either uncompressed or had low compression rates, so they were only used in some games and did not have many other uses.
(Translator’s Notes: WAV — Uncompressed or lightly compressed audio file format commonly used for high-quality sound but with large file sizes.)
As for songs, people simply put CDs into CD players and listened that way. There was no particular reason to put them into computers. Each one could be around 50 megabytes, making transfer difficult, and computer storage capacity was still not very large at the time.
If there was a stair before video, it definitely seemed to be MP3.
Music was content that had possessed a huge market since long ago, and its capacity was far smaller than video.
‘And the industries connected to this were also enormous.’
MP3 players had dominated an era as portable small digital devices, and online music services were still thriving up to 2025, when Insu died.
‘Spotify was worth around two hundred trillion won, wasn’t it?’
Two hundred trillion won meant it was a company on the same level as Intel, Netflix, or SK hynix.
(Translator’s Notes: SK hynix — Major South Korean semiconductor)
Naturally, he coveted it. Moreover, Insu could build this kind of platform relatively easily. After all, they had already entered ESD development.
ESD sold software, but essentially, it received payment online in exchange for transmitting digital data, so its essence was the same.
But as he tried to begin development immediately, there was something that bothered him.
The internet environment was fine. Even now, it took only a little over ten minutes to download one song, so it was not completely unusable. And since development would take time, internet speed would be faster by then.
The problem was that MP3 players did not exist yet.
‘No. They have been developed.’
After searching the internet a bit, he found that they had indeed been developed. But only around twenty sample units had been made, and mass production had failed. Looking into the details, their capacity was too small, their technical completeness was low, they often failed to operate properly, and there were problems with sound quality and battery life.
They had merely shown possibility, not become proper products.
“When will they come out?”
He had no particular intention of developing one himself. Insu was, after all, a software developer. He knew nothing about hardware.
Of course, he could try. If he bought the company that made the device called Listen Up, hired hardware developers, gave them a planning document, and told them to make it, there was not zero possibility.
But because it was a field he did not know well, the odds were probably not high.
‘Then I’d only waste money, time, and passion.’
Moreover, MP3 players were products without especially high technical barriers, so competition had been extremely fierce. But since it was manufacturing, factories and many employees were fundamentally required, creating high risk.
Even if it was a failed product, a prototype had already appeared. A proper product would probably come out if he waited a few years, and he did not want to take risks for that.
‘Should I develop the platform first and wait?’
Aside from the fact that MP3 players did not yet exist, there was also the copyright issue.
By the standard method, he would have to negotiate with rights holders and register music sources, but record companies were unlikely to permit that.
Naturally so. Digital distribution would destroy the foundation record companies possessed. One might think simply that they would receive copyright fees either way, but reality was more complicated than that.
First of all, record companies sold CDs, and CDs did not contain only one song. They were packaged by album. But if songs were sold for download on a per-track basis, profits might decrease.
And record companies held strong control over artists, distribution, and marketing. Through this power structure, they held the upper hand in negotiations with artists, took large profits, and made new artists come to them.