The 2-Byte Input Revolution
Rule Breaker.
The greatest challenge given to Lee Chan-soo was overseeing ID Office 2.0. At the same time, he was personally leading the development of ID Word Processor as its lead programmer.
The core features of Office 2.0 could be summarized as shape drawing and animation, dictionary, spell checker, and macros. Shape drawing and animation were primarily for presentations, while the dictionary and spell checker would see the most use in the word processor. Macros were especially important for spreadsheets. However, these functions were designed to be freely usable across the entire ID Office suite, thanks to the dynamic object manager that Yoo Jae-won had already implemented in ID Office 1.0.
Still, creating these features wasn’t easy. To make the spell checker work, the system had to remember every single correct character. For now, that meant painstaking manual labor. Since there was no national language institute like the National Institute of Korean Language at this time, there wasn’t even a standardized Korean dictionary available.
ID Group had selected the 1975 edition of the Sae Uri Mal Keun Sajajeon as their reference for the Korean dictionary. It contained a staggering 300,000 registered words. They had purchased the computer rights and were currently in the middle of digitizing it. For the Korean-English dictionary, they were using the Essence Korean-English Dictionary published by Minjungseorim.
The workload was enormous, but since it was simple data entry that could easily be divided among workers, they were rapidly hiring large numbers of part-time staff.
There was also one separate, independent project: the language input system.
Korea, blessed with the Hangul writing system, could use computers almost as easily as English-speaking countries. While the keyboard layout differed, documents could be created effortlessly by following Hangul’s natural principles. However, things became far more complicated once you moved into logographic scripts. The Asian countries that used Chinese characters—especially China and Japan—were the biggest problems.
Of course, Yoo Jae-won already knew the solution. When he had entrusted ID Office to Lee Chan-soo, he had casually mentioned the idea of a language input system that could easily handle Chinese or Japanese characters, then promptly forgotten about it. But it seemed Lee Chan-soo had already brought it to a presentable level.
Yoo Jae-won immediately vacated his seat. He could have taken the floppy disk and installed it himself, but he wanted to give Lee Chan-soo the satisfaction of demonstrating it personally.
Lee Chan-soo inserted the floppy disk into Yoo Jae-won’s Egg PC and began the installation. It took some time. The disk’s transfer speed was slow, so they had to wait several minutes. The package included Japanese and Chinese fonts, dictionary data, and the core program. Compressed, it came to 1.4 megabytes—a rather large program for the time. Fortunately, there were no bad sectors, and the installation completed safely.
However, nothing seemed to change on the desktop. The same was true when they launched ID Word Processor. The familiar interface showed no new additions.
When Lee Chan-soo went into the settings, a new entry labeled “Two-Byte Language Inputter” had been added at the very bottom. Suddenly, Yoo Jae-won realized that the name “Two-Byte Language Inputter” would only make sense to people with specialized computer knowledge. He made a mental note to change it to “Multilingual Input System” later.
After finishing the settings, Lee Chan-soo typed “konnichiwa” using English letters. The system instantly converted it into the hiragana spelling of “hello.” Switching to katakana was just as simple—if the word was entered entirely in uppercase letters while in English input mode, the system would automatically output it in katakana instead.
Yoo Jae-won was slightly surprised by Lee Chan-soo’s response. He had translated the sentence into Japanese without the slightest hesitation. People always said Japanese got harder the more you learned it, but judging by his quick reflexes, it seemed Lee Chan-soo would have no trouble mastering even the difficult parts. Since Yoo Jae-won planned to expand into Japan soon, having a talented person nearby who was already good at Japanese was excellent news.
The difficulty had just gone up. The reason Japanese word processors were so hard to develop was precisely because the Japanese used three different scripts—kanji, hiragana, and katakana.
Lee Chan-soo began constructing the sentence using his own creation, following Yoo Jae-won’s instructions. At first glance, the method did not seem particularly complicated. The word “yesterday” was written as a Chinese character compound in Japanese and pronounced “kinou.” You would type “ki” using the keyboard and then press the Chinese character conversion key. A selection window containing characters pronounced “ki” would appear, allowing you to choose the appropriate character from the list.
“Hmm.”
At first, Yoo Jae-won had been impressed, letting out an admiring “Oh~.” But once they reached the kanji input section, his expression went blank. Or rather, he was maintaining a poker face to hide his disappointment.
Typing kanji one by one like this would never let them dominate the Japanese word processor market. The typing efficiency was simply too low. To be truly efficient, users needed to be able to input the desired kanji with just two or, at most, three keystrokes. Yet with Lee Chan-soo’s current method, entering a single desired kanji required pressing five, six, or even seven keys. As a result, typing the short sentence “Yesterday Haruka ate rice at a restaurant” took nearly a full minute.
Lee Chan-soo had noticed the change in Yoo Jae-won’s expression and quickly offered an explanation. Even he, the creator of the input system, was well aware that this method was inefficient. However, he simply hadn’t been able to come up with anything better.
“To type the Japanese word for ‘yesterday,’ you first have to enter the beginning of the word, right? Then, instead of displaying only a list of Chinese characters, the system could show every word that starts with those letters directly beneath the cursor. Not just an individual character, but the complete word ‘yesterday’ itself. The same principle applies to other words. Take the daytime greeting ‘hello,’ for example. If you type only the first part of the word, the complete greeting would immediately appear below the cursor as a suggestion.”
“Then you assign numbers to the candidate characters. The most commonly used one, like ‘yesterday,’ becomes number 1. So if you type ‘saku’ and then press 1, ‘yesterday’ is entered immediately.”
At Yoo Jae-won’s explanation, Lee Chan-soo let out a sharp “Huk!” Just from listening to the description, it was obvious that Yoo Jae-won’s method would be dramatically faster than what he had created.
“This approach could be applied not only to Chinese characters but to ordinary words as well. And not just for Japanese—Korean too. If you type ‘hello,’ the system could automatically complete it to ‘hello, how are you.’ You could even make it so that commonly used phrases like ‘hello’ appear after entering only the first few characters and pressing Tab.”
Lee Chan-soo’s mouth hung open. This was the very method he had spent countless hours racking his brain to develop. Although Yoo Jae-won had given him the general direction, matching English pronunciation to hiragana and katakana had been hard work, and matching kanji to English pronunciation had been even harder. Yet Yoo Jae-won had taken one look at what he built, immediately identified its weaknesses, and even offered a perfect solution to fix them.
Lee Chan-soo once again felt that coming all the way to Yeoju had been the right decision.
Then, suddenly, his mouth fell open even wider.
“Y-yes, that’s right.”
Yoo Jae-won found Lee Chan-soo’s sparkling eyes a little overwhelming. What he had described were features that were widely used in input systems throughout the 21st century.
“Hmm. If we add AI-based word recommendation using user data on top of that, it would be complete.”
“It’s not that grand. Basically, the system would prioritize frequently used words and move them to the top of the candidate list. For something like ‘hello,’ which is used very often, you could type only the initial characters and then press Tab to complete the entire phrase. The more frequently a word is used, the higher it would rank. Eventually, we would introduce a true AI capable of understanding the sentences the user is writing and predicting the words most likely to come next.”
Once his specialty came up, Yoo Jae-won couldn’t stop talking. In his previous life, he had risen to heaven with AI algorithms, only to fall into the abyss. Creating an AI that combined accumulated user data with sentence analysis to assist in document writing was not particularly difficult for him.
The real problem was hardware. Running an AI required an enormous amount of computation, but this was a world that didn’t even have GPUs yet, let alone TPUs. For now, the best they could do was recommend candidate words based on the few characters that had already been typed. Even that consumed a lot of memory, so it wasn’t suitable for mass adoption yet. At the very least, they would need Pentium CPUs before they could create flashy graphics and powerful features smooth enough to make existing customers want to upgrade.
There was a noticeable drop in energy in Lee Chan-soo’s voice. He had wanted to show Yoo Jae-won the completed two-byte language inputter and receive praise. He had expected some useful feedback, but instead he had been handed a project that might take years to complete.
The language input system was not merely a program to be installed in ID Office. Its far greater purpose was to be integrated into the Android operating system to support countless countries. Cupcake was the codename for Android 1.0, which the Silicon Valley team and Yoo Jae-won were pouring all their energy into developing. Through it, people all over the world would be able to use computers in their native languages. The barrier for beginners would be lowered dramatically.
That meant they could spread Android, ID Office, and the internet into every household!
If Yoo Jae-won had his way, he would also complete the Chinese input system. But there was no immediate rush. China’s reform and opening-up policy would begin a little later, and even after that, their awareness of copyright wouldn’t immediately reach the level of developed countries. There was more than enough time to refine the quality of the language input system Lee Chan-soo had created.
It felt like the new year had only just arrived, yet time had already flown by and it was now late February. Many big and small events had occurred, but if one had to pick the biggest global event, it would undoubtedly be February 24th.
It was the day the biggest turning point occurred in the Gulf War, which had begun with Operation Desert Storm. Until then, the multinational forces had only attacked with missiles and bombing from the air and sea. Starting on the 24th, the 300,000 ground troops waiting on the Saudi Arabia-Iraq border began a full-scale advance toward Iraq.
The multinational ground forces swept across the wide-open Iraqi territory and surrounded Kuwait. Although Kuwait was defended by 100,000 elite troops of the Iraqi Republican Guard—the pride of the Iraqi army—they were crushed in an instant, caught between the hammer and anvil of the multinational forces attacking from both sides. It was a modern application of the ancient hammer-and-anvil tactic on a strategic scale.
The recapture of Kuwait City took less than a day under the overwhelming offensive. After recovering the capital of Kuwait, the multinational forces continued their advance into Iraq. Just three days later, on February 27th, Iraq declared that it would unconditionally accept all twelve United Nations resolutions that had been issued before the war. Soon after, footage of President Bush declaring the end of the Gulf War from the Oval Office played on television all day long.
Yoo Jae-won thought it would have been better if they had marched all the way to Baghdad and captured President Hussein. That way, they wouldn’t have had to invade again later, and the situation in the Middle East would have been far more stable. Instead, they had accepted Iraq’s declaration and declared the war over.
Still, the United States and the countries that had participated in the multinational force were loudly celebrating their first taste of victory in a long time. The mood was the same in America, Britain, and even in Korea.
February 25th — ID Software’s latest title, DOOM, officially launches in the United States and Canada.
“Whoa!”
The employees in the ID Group secretary’s office who had been watching the monitor burst into cheers. It wasn’t because the Gulf War had ended. On February 25th, ID Software under ID Group had released their latest title, DOOM, after more than a year of preparation. Now, a full day later, reactions to DOOM were pouring in.
And of course, they were all glowing reviews. First-day sales were breaking new records, and quite a few people had even purchased it through the new ESD (Electronic Software Distribution) online service.
Everyone was rejoicing—except for Yoo Jae-won. He had known from the beginning that ID Software’s DOOM would be a success. Moreover, with significantly improved graphics and much stronger network play compared to the original timeline, it was a title that simply could not fail. Looking at the report that had just arrived, it felt like he was simply picking up a gold medal that had already been promised to him.
No, that description wasn’t enough. It was more like a max-level warrior who had entered a beginner zone wielding a weapon like Excalibur whose victory was guaranteed from the start. The only surprise would be if it somehow failed.
“By the way, what the hell is Gates doing? How long does it take to think this over?”
What was actually making Yoo Jae-won’s heart race with anxiety was the Microsoft acquisition. Unlike DOOM, acquiring Microsoft was something that had never happened in his previous life. He had been pressing as hard as he could, but there was still no contact. Remembering the saying that even a tiger comes when called by name, he picked up the office phone before Kim Dae-seok could answer it.
He had been doing this for a whole month now, and every single call had been a dud.
Ring ring.
The phone rang again. As usual, he didn’t have a good feeling about it. He was about to ignore it when Kim Dae-seok, who was in charge of calls, answered immediately.
“Hello?” he began in Korean, but quickly switched languages. It was English. After exchanging a few words, Kim Dae-seok suddenly looked up at Yoo Jae-won with wide eyes and shouted.
It seemed the man’s composure had completely collapsed. Even as he took the receiver, Yoo Jae-won had no idea what choice Gates had made. But because the outcome of this challenge was still unknown, his heart pounded with excitement.