American Dream
"Welcome." Lee Yong-kwon greeted Yoo Jae-won first.
"Thank you for the warm welcome, President."
Just a few months ago, Lee Yong-kwon had been vice president. Thanks to the massive success of the Egg PC, he had been promoted to president. In his place, Chairman Lee Yong-tae had retired as honorary chairman. With six business partners in the company, it seemed the Lee brothers could no longer hold both the chairman and president positions simultaneously. Still, because Lee Yong-kwon had inherited the company's management rights, there would be no cracks in the partnership between ID Group and Sambo Computer.
Lee Yong-kwon led Yoo Jae-won straight to the factory office.
"Whoa!" The moment he stepped inside, something caught Yoo Jae-won's eye. "It turned out even better than I imagined!"
"Of course! Whose design do you think it is? I nearly died trying to produce it exactly according to the final draft."
It wasn't hard to guess—this was the Sambo Computer factory. Sitting on the desk was a computer. More precisely, it was the next model in the Egg PC line: the New Egg retail version.
Over a year and a half had passed since the Egg PC's launch. While improvements had been made—adding various colors to the polycarbonate shell and upgrading the specs—sales had gradually begun to decline. What had once seemed revolutionary was now being matched by all-in-one products from other PC manufacturers. Though none surpassed the Egg PC in refinement or design, several models now stood shoulder to shoulder with it. It was time for a new product.
Especially for Sambo Computer, which had just completed a massive investment, the pressure was on. For them, Yoo Jae-won had designed the New Egg—the very same computer he had once shown Park Sang-kwon when displaying his investment returns.
The only difference between then and now was the monitor. The prototype New Egg in Yoo Jae-won's office had featured an LCD monitor, while the retail version before him came equipped with a CRT.
Yoo Jae-won had wanted to include an LCD in the retail model as well, but the drawbacks far outweighed the advantages, forcing him to settle on CRT. Because of the CRT monitor, the model in front of him felt quite different from the prototype. The prototype had given off an ET-like impression thanks to its slim monitor, whereas this version had a larger screen and a bulkier main body. Even so, the monitor and main unit remained distinctly separate, true to the New Egg concept. A sturdy alloy arm supported the monitor, allowing adjustments to its angle and direction.
Another distinctive feature was the aluminum case. Coated in matte silver, it exuded a premium feel, while the Trigem and ID logos embedded in one corner were given a glossy finish to stand out.
"Shall we turn it on?"
"Go ahead! Anytime!"
Lee Yong-kwon answered with confidence. With a slight flutter of anticipation, Yoo Jae-won pressed the round power button. The BIOS POST screen flashed briefly before transitioning to the boot screen. It showed an Android robot running diligently, forming the word "Loading." This was the same screen first introduced in Android Alpha, and it had become one of the OS's most popular elements. Those with some skill in handling computers and good systems were particularly interested in shortening the loading screen as much as possible. Some could even reach the desktop before the "L" in "Loading" appeared—or even before the Android robot showed up.
The loading screen this time was slightly different from Alpha's. While Android Alpha's robot had been a tin-can model, the new one was sleek and streamlined, boasting a bright ivory color. The concept was that the robot would be upgraded with each new Android version. Eventually, when artificial intelligence was introduced, the Android mascot would understand human speech and respond accordingly. Of course, that was still a distant future, something to merely imagine for now.
In any case, the appearance of the Android robot during boot made the version easy to identify. Since Sambo Computer was an important partner, the Android 1.0 preview version had naturally been provided, so it was only fitting that the New Egg came pre-installed with version 1.0.
"Wow, the colors look great."
Once the word "Loading" was fully formed, the desktop appeared. A blue sky with fluffy clouds drifting gently over a green meadow welcomed Yoo Jae-won. It was a photograph of a vast vineyard near San Francisco, taken by a photographer Yoo Jae-won had personally hired and then digitally retouched for the Android 1.0 default wallpaper. Wallpapers had been prepared not only for VGA but also for the emerging SVGA resolutions, and even for Full HD screens that had yet to be standardized.
The New Egg they had prepared was the top-tier model, supporting 24-bit color via SVGA. Though the CRT monitor lacked a sharp, vibrant feel, the details were clearly alive.
"Naturally! We installed ATI's latest SVGA model with 4 megabytes of dedicated video RAM."
More memory was always better. With ample video memory, the number of colors and resolutions that could be displayed simultaneously increased, and it could serve as a frame buffer to create smoother visuals.
The desktop icons, the Start button, the Ribbon Interface, and so on—the Android 1.0 preview version didn't seem much different from Alpha at first glance. The panel that appeared when pressing the Start button and the file manager's layout were nearly identical, differing only in details. However, compared to Alpha, it had become strikingly more colorful. In Alpha, icons had been smaller, and only 16 colors had been used. Android 1.0 supported 16-bit color by default, with a 256-color mode available for lower-spec computers.
What stood out most was the transparency technology. When the file manager was opened, the ribbon displaying the path and the ribbon containing file management icons like copy, delete, and move became semi-transparent, allowing the desktop or previously opened windows to show through.
That was all. It was a visually pleasing eye-candy feature, but to activate it, one needed a high-end video card and a CPU of at least 486 level. Some developers on the Silicon Valley team had questioned why they were creating a feature that looked pretty but offered no practical benefit to computer operation. Yoo Jae-won had told them there was an answer: because it was pretty!
Transparent and semi-transparent interfaces offered visuals that no previous graphical interface had shown. Handed over to the global marketing team, they could create incredibly effective promotional materials to attract potential users. Moreover, the next version would incorporate practical functions using transparency. For example, combining the Exposé feature—which allowed easy switching between open programs when pressing Alt and Tab simultaneously—with the transparency effect would make it far more visually appealing.
While it inherited Android Alpha's interface, many things had changed. The biggest was multitasking. In the DOS-based Alpha, only one program could run at a time. Multitasking had been extremely rare. With ID Office, one could open multiple documents and switch between them, or format a floppy disk while writing a document in ID Office—that was the extent of it. In Android 1.0, with its completely Unix-based kernel, multitasking was easy as long as the computer's performance allowed it. Playing MIDI music or WAVE files while writing documents was basic. With well-optimized games, one could even enjoy games while listening to different music. One could even run resource-heavy programs like disk cleanup while gaming or working. Of course, the prerequisite was good computer performance. The key factors were CPU and RAM capacity! With a 486 DX-33 and 4 megabytes of RAM, he was confident that three or four tasks could be handled comfortably.
The New Egg Yoo Jae-won was currently using had 8 megabytes of memory, a 486 DX2-66 CPU, the latest video card, and even a dedicated DSP chip for high-quality sound processing. It performed smoothly.
"Using this, I can really see it becoming a huge hit." Lee Yong-kwon raised his right thumb in approval of Android 1.0. "Even the sound quality seems better!"
This time, his left thumb went up. Kim Dae-seok, who had been silently watching from the side, thought he needed to learn how well the new president of Sambo handled sales.
"Wow, you have sharp ears, President. I put some effort into the multimedia support. I built the audio engine and mixer myself to output the original sound as is."
That was Kim Dae-seok's misunderstanding. Lee Yong-kwon's ears, trained from his hobby of listening to hi-fi music, had allowed him to directly experience the audio performance improvements Yoo Jae-won had worked so hard on.
Yoo Jae-won had systematically studied various instruments while preparing for his regression in his previous life. Through that, he had listened to a great deal of music and naturally come to enjoy it. To someone like him, the mediocre media capabilities of IBM-compatible PCs were enough to make him sigh. Computers designed for office use from the start were unsuitable for music listening in both hardware and software. A thirsty person digs a well. So Yoo Jae-won had stepped in. He had personally designed and coded the multimedia features, including sound, for Android 1.0. The result was impressive enough that Lee Yong-kwon, accustomed to hi-fi, raised his thumb twice.
Of course, even with enhanced multimedia, the hardware had to provide solid support. If the sound card was poorly designed with inadequate noise reduction and paired with cheap speakers, the improvement wouldn't be noticeable.
"That said, I can't be completely certain it'll be a hit. The issue is the application programs."
"That's true." The software companies that had received the preview version were working hard to prepare, but no one was optimistic that there wouldn't be any confusion after the official release.
"By the way, has the release date been confirmed?"
"Yes!"
"You mentioned around fall, right?"
"Ah, that was the situation a month ago. Things have changed. August 15th is looking likely."
Development had gone very smoothly. Whenever a few obstacles arose, Yoo Jae-won lent a hand and they resolved as if by magic. Thanks to that, the latest preview version was so complete that calling it version 0.9 wouldn't be an exaggeration. There were even a few people using the leaked preview version instead of Alpha.
"August 15th? Then there's less than two months left."
They had set the date exactly two years after the announcement of Android Alpha and ID Office as D-Day. The largest opening show in history was being prepared. The news of Android 1.0's announcement would be widely broadcast through all media—television, radio, newspapers—and offline events were also being prepared on a grand scale.
"Will you invite me too?"
"Of course. On August 15th, the world will see Android 1.0 running on this machine broadcast on television worldwide. Naturally, the president of Sambo Computer should be standing right beside it."
Yoo Jae-won spoke while looking at the New Egg on the table. The reason he had come all the way to Sambo's Pangyo factory today was to take delivery of the first completed New Egg. After installing Android 1.0, he planned to run every possible test until August 15th. He vividly remembered Bill Gates suffering a massive embarrassment when the Blue Screen of Death appeared during the announcement of the next-generation Windows in his previous life. It was always in the top three whenever IT's dark history was discussed. On August 15th, he couldn't afford such a humiliating failure, so he was preparing thoroughly in advance for testing. Of course, the next-generation Windows Gates had announced back then had been an unstable DOS-based version, while Android 1.0 was built on Unix, where stability was paramount. Yoo Jae-won was willing to bet his entire fortune that malfunctions would never occur. Still, the principal's final words had been a warning not to be arrogant. Until the very end, he would not allow arrogance or complacency.