The Daejeon Expo Invitation
Technopia 1993. It was surprising enough that Chairman Oh Myung had sent an email in the first place. Naturally, Yoo Jae-won set aside all other reports and clicked on Oh Myung’s message first. He did not open it out of simple delight, however. Before accessing any external mail, he first verified that his protective programs were running properly. That meant the antivirus and firewall software.
The antivirus program was the V6 International version, which had gained fame ever since Android Alpha. In Korea, Kim Cheol-su had become a household name in the computer industry with the title “the second Yoo Jae-won” thanks to the V6 vaccine. He later dropped out of medical school to found V6, an antivirus company, and the business was now on solid footing. The fact that V6 had been the first antivirus created specifically for the Android operating system had been a tremendous help.
Of course, Kim Cheol-su’s path had not been entirely smooth. When Android Alpha was upgraded to Android 1.0 and the kernel shifted from DOS to Unix, the V6 2.0 he had painstakingly prepared became useless. Existing viruses no longer worked under the new Unix system either, and for a while there was even talk that antivirus programs were unnecessary. Yet hackers always targeted the operating system with the largest market share. Viruses evolved to match Android 1.0’s Unix kernel. Although the improved security made them harder to create, new viruses eventually appeared, and V6’s value returned.
Yoo Jae-won’s recommendation had also played a significant role. Feeling slightly guilty for having overlooked Kim Cheol-su during the kernel change, he had publicly endorsed V6 as the antivirus of choice. Objectively speaking, there was no obligation to go that far, but Yoo Jae-won wanted to spark an early IT boom in Korea and believed it would be better if Kim Cheol-su, one of the first-generation figures, succeeded spectacularly. Moreover, the performance of the Android 1.0 version of V6 was genuinely good, so the recommendation was not forced. Thanks to that, among the many candidates touted as “the second Yoo Jae-won,” only Kim Cheol-su had truly succeeded.
The firewall was a product from Symantec, an American security specialist. It had reached its position through its own performance rather than any recommendation from Yoo Jae-won. The data center he had built in Coyote City also used Symantec products, a testament to their reliability.
Of course, most ordinary users neither knew nor used antivirus or firewall software. Once Yoo Jae-won confirmed both safety programs were active, he opened the email.
—Email received! I’ll compile a report by tomorrow morning at the latest.
As expected of Choi Kang-wook. He must have been sitting at his computer, because the reply came instantly.
—Thank you, as always! The broadcasting station will contact you with details. I’ll make sure your convenience is prioritized.
Interestingly, Oh Myung’s reply also arrived quickly. It was still morning business hours in Korea, so the chairman had apparently been at his desk as well. Yoo Jae-won sent back a brief message saying it was nothing and that Oh Myung should feel free to ask for anything else if needed. The consideration the former minister had shown was one of the cornerstones that had made today’s Yoo Jae-won and ID Group possible; unless the request was unreasonable, he was willing to accommodate it.
A few days later.
Yoo Jae-won woke early and, as usual, tried to start his day only to feel his body stiff and sluggish. He stepped onto the treadmill. At seventeen—the age that could chew rocks—he was normally overflowing with energy, so the fatigue caught him off guard. Lately he had been buried under an avalanche of work; overwork had become routine. He could not recall working this hard since his regression. Rest when tired, one might say, but after regressing his constitution seemed different. A good sweat followed by a sauna washed the fatigue away completely. It was something he would never have managed once his age advanced, but right now he had energy to spare, so there was no problem.
“Whew! I feel alive again.”
After sweating it out in his personal sauna, Yoo Jae-won drank a sports beverage. The cold sensation spread through his body, bringing fresh vitality. Hunger followed. His morning appetite, which had been dead, returned. He prepared breakfast himself. The menu was, as always, cereal. He poured yogurt halfway into a bowl larger than a rice bowl, added about two cups of Corn Frost, and that was his breakfast. It looked both healthy and haphazard at the same time, yet it had never once upset his stomach.
After finishing the simple meal at the table, he loaded the dishes into the dishwasher and returned to his study. There was quite a bit to handle today, so he was starting work early.
—Chairman, wasn’t our next project a low-power processor?
On the monitor, Lisa Su spoke with a hint of complaint. Her profile in the semiconductor industry had risen dramatically, and she looked far more energetic than when he had first met her. After escaping an endless post-doctoral grind, she had been scouted into ID Technology’s semiconductor division, where she had freely demonstrated her abilities and was now driving real change in the industry. Life must taste sweet to her now.
The next challenge for the division, fresh off its Coppermine success, was designing a low-power processor. The HPC-grade CPUs that Intel and AMD had released or were about to release were extremely complex and power-hungry. The current stagnation in the notebook market stemmed from the lack of mobile-specific designs; manufacturers simply took desktop chips and reduced their clock speeds to lower power consumption. Yoo Jae-won intended to create an entirely new CPU optimized for low power while still delivering adequate performance. Since he held no x86 license, he planned to design the microcode from scratch as well.
Just as no one in semiconductors lacked the ambition to design a CPU themselves, Lisa Su was no exception. She had been preparing with full support from ID Technology’s semiconductor division, yet what Yoo Jae-won sent her differed greatly from what she had expected.
“Ah, I’m not abandoning the low-power CPU. A different task simply needs to be completed first. Think of it as a light warm-up problem before tackling the big one.”
—A warm-up problem that’s a bit too difficult, isn’t it?
Lisa Su’s voice softened at his explanation, yet the new task was no easy matter either.
—A universal serial bus? Is a port that unifies all peripherals even possible?
Exactly as she said, the “warm-up problem” Yoo Jae-won had assigned was a chipset for USB.
“I’ve already completed the design. Dr. Su, please verify whether it works properly once fabricated as an ASIC chip.”
ASIC stood for application-specific integrated circuit. In the past, “semiconductor” had referred to products with general-purpose logic circuits, but recently specialized chips tailored to a customer’s exact needs had become the mainstream. Prime examples included 3D acceleration chipsets, modems, and DSPs for sound processing. Yoo Jae-won intended to popularize USB through dedicated chips as well.
He had not designed the chip circuitry himself. Instead, he had defined the protocol for exchanging data and signals through the USB port and completed the low-level driver that controlled it within the operating system. What he was entrusting to Lisa Su was the design of a chip capable of handling that driver and protocol in hardware.
“Besides, it’s not all that different from making a processor.”
Yoo Jae-won also planned to embed a very small controller inside the chip to manage USB in hardware, thereby minimizing CPU usage whenever the USB port was in operation.
—What?
Lisa Su asked in surprise. She was startled not by the processor issue, but by the fact that the USB design itself was already finished. She had known Yoo Jae-won operated beyond ordinary imagination, yet she had never expected him to single-handedly design the next-generation I/O device to replace the serial port. At the same time, she found herself nodding. From what she had seen, whenever Yoo Jae-won needed something, he either acquired it without regard for cost or simply built it himself if it did not exist. The very reason she had been brought to Silicon Valley was the Coppermine process, which itself had originated from his frustration with slow CPUs. Lisa Su had long acknowledged that the ports used to connect peripherals to computers were chaotic and overly complicated, but unlike Yoo Jae-won she had never felt compelled to fix them herself. Although the low-power processor she had anticipated had been postponed, USB was clearly an item that, like Coppermine, would bring massive change to computers. Her motivation surged once more.
—By the way, despite the name “universal serial bus,” the port shape seems more complicated than expected. There are many pins and the form is intricate. It will be difficult for manufacturers to produce.
Because Lisa Su’s disposition was that of a developer, her focus naturally leaned toward developers and manufacturers. Yoo Jae-won’s perspective was the opposite.
“Yes. Concentrating on user convenience naturally led to that shape. I also kept expandability in mind for future 2.0 and 3.0 versions.”
When designing USB, the greatest challenge had not been the chip but the port’s physical shape. USB devices were so convenient that they could unify countless existing ports at once. There was only one drawback: the port had an up-down orientation, so the probability of plugging it in correctly on the first try was only fifty percent. Yoo Jae-won himself had rarely managed to insert a USB device correctly in one go. That was why he had designed it from the start without any up-down distinction, following the shape of USB 3.0. He had simply made the port larger; with current fabrication technology, making it too small would increase both cost and failure rates, so he had doubled the size.
“I’ll send you the design files shortly. Contact me anytime if problems arise.”
—Understood. I’ll do my best to produce it.
Yoo Jae-won concluded his meeting with Lisa Su. With that, the USB issue was completely resolved. What had not been discussed, however, was the matter of USB adoption. Yoo Jae-won intended to provide the technology to motherboard manufacturers free of charge. If he wanted USB ports to become a standard feature on motherboards, the most effective approach was to avoid placing any financial burden on the manufacturers. In return, he planned to collect modest royalties from peripheral device companies that produced products using USB ports—fees small enough not to become a burden. He could have made the technology entirely free, but that carried the risk of flooding the market with low-quality products capable of damaging computers. To prevent that, he attached a reasonable licensing fee.
“USB is done.”
Without pause, Yoo Jae-won moved on to the next item. This time he opened an IDW file titled “Android 2.0 Hacking Contest Proposal.” As the name suggested, it outlined an event in which participants would compete to hack the Android 2.0 operating system.
“That damn Fox TV is the problem.”
The rumor that had started with Fox TV was being picked up and amplified by other broadcasters. Even without any concrete evidence, the way they reported it made it seem as though something real existed, enough to tempt even people with professional computer knowledge. Moreover, with no SNS in existence, Yoo Jae-won’s rebuttals could not reach users directly. The post he had uploaded to Nextcom had garnered tens of thousands of views in a single day and made it onto the Today’s Best list, but its reach remained limited because it only reached people who actually visited Nextcom.
That was why he had planned the hacking contest as a way to dispel the rumor that Android 2.0 contained a backdoor. The contest would award ten million dollars to anyone who could breach Android 2.0’s security system and extract information from a PC. It was a revival of the Global Security Challenge that had instantly elevated ID Group’s profile to world-class status.
That was not all. Another IDW file opened on Yoo Jae-won’s monitor. The second document was titled “Daejeon Expo Showcase.” It contained a proposal to turn the Daejeon Expo into an event that would demonstrate, in reality, the future created by next-generation IT technology. The plan was to use the hacking contest to prove Android 2.0’s security to the world, then immediately follow it with the expo to showcase the rosy future of IT, thereby elevating ID Group’s image to an even higher level.
According to Chief of Staff Choi Kang-wook’s report after inspecting the expo preparations in Korea, the hardware side was flawless. All that remained was to properly prepare the content that would fill it.
“I hope it works well.”
At this point, Yoo Jae-won felt a slight twinge of concern. If it had been the early or mid-21st century, he would have known people’s tastes with certainty, but he could not be sure whether the items he had prepared would appeal to audiences in 1993.
“Still, we have to do our best.”
From the drones being developed at the high-tech research institute, to ID Group’s new products and the items he had personally prepared for the expo, there was nothing he could discard and nothing more he could add. All he could do now was hope that an overwhelming volume of content would succeed.
“By the way, when is the CIA going to show the sincerity they promised?”
That was what CIA Director of Science and Technology John McMahon had personally said. Nearly a week had passed since then, yet nothing had happened. Just as disappointment—though not quite betrayal—was rising, a ding sounded. A new message had arrived in Yoo Jae-won’s ID Talk.