The Prototype Ignites
Ultima Online ding! With a crisp beep, the once-dark monitor flickered to life, revealing the familiar BIOS screen. The system immediately began its CPU check, followed by the memory test, before launching into a normal boot sequence. The biggest hurdle in assembling the computer had been cleared without incident. There was nothing more frustrating than a machine that refused to power on, forcing endless cycles of assembly and disassembly just to hunt down the fault. Fortunately, every component gathered this time was a hand-picked golden sample from each manufacturer, and all pre-testing had gone flawlessly. The packaging had been almost excessively secure during shipping. Yoo Jae-won’s own assembly work had been impeccable as well. Working alone, haste might have caused him to miss a connection or leave a fitting loose, but Tiffany’s presence had eliminated those risks. Determined to show his girlfriend a composed and professional side, he had assembled everything methodically and meticulously, despite the urge to rush.
“Wow! It’s beautiful!” The assembly had taken far longer than usual, yet Tiffany’s pure exclamation of delight brought a wave of satisfaction and pride. Even to Yoo Jae-won’s eyes, the powered-on iWorks prototype looked impressive. The aluminum case, the reinforced glass side panel that revealed the interior, and the subtle green LED lighting formed a sleek, sophisticated combination. The only imperfection was the cable management. Power supply cables snaked across the motherboard and peripherals in every direction, resembling the innards of a small animal. Proper cable routing would have improved the look, but confirming stable operation came first. Besides, Yoo Jae-won already had a plan for cable management—dedicated iWorks accessories.
The difficulty of cable management stemmed from power cables being designed for generic PC environments or supplied in overly generous lengths. Cases of this era also lacked any convenience features for cable routing. Yoo Jae-won intended to commission a high-performance power supply from a specialist manufacturer, tailored exclusively for iWorks, with precisely measured cable lengths. He also planned to design a double-layered case that would route all excess cables to the rear. None of these refinements existed yet, so for now the prototype would run without cable management. There was no time for it anyway. Assembly alone did not complete the machine; an operating system still had to be installed.
The operating system Yoo Jae-won had prepared was Beta 5, the latest developer build of the next-generation Android OS. It was the Enterprise edition, supporting multi-core processors and high-capacity memory.
“What’s that? Aren’t you taking out a CD?” Tiffany asked as Yoo Jae-won produced a small object the size of an index finger.
“It’s called a USB memory stick,” he replied proudly.
Since the CD-ROM era had begun, software sizes had ballooned, yet CD-ROM transfer speeds remained far slower than typical processing rates. The fastest 8x CD-ROM drive released the previous week managed only 1.2 MB/s—and even that speed was not sustained. Installing an operating system could easily take thirty minutes, a painfully slow process for Yoo Jae-won. Hence the USB memory stick.
“That’s a storage device?” Tiffany was genuinely surprised. The idea of building a storage device from flash memory chips was still novel; most people viewed flash memory as tiny chips found only in mobile phones. Even among computer professionals, flash memory had limited recognition.
“How much capacity do you think it has?”
“Hmm… sixteen megabytes?” Tiffany guessed, recalling the sixteen-megabyte storage in the phone he had given her as a gift—a custom unit using the highest-capacity flash memory chip then available from Mirae Electronics.
Yoo Jae-won’s scale was far larger. “Two hundred fifty-six megabytes. Even this small device contains sixteen flash memory chips inside, plus a controller chip that manages them.”
He felt a twinge of embarrassment after boasting. The USB memory stick had been developed by Mirae Electronics’ research lab; while Yoo Jae-won had supplied the concept, the actual product had been realized by their engineers. The result exceeded expectations. Transfer speeds reached 8 MB per second, with far superior seek times and random read/write performance compared to CD-ROMs. The unit cost, however, was astronomical. Flash memory was inherently expensive, sixteen chips had been used, and the controller was a low-volume production item.
“So how much did it cost?”
“Ten thousand dollars.”
“Good heavens!”
Even at factory price the figure was staggering. Tiffany was speechless. Yoo Jae-won felt the same. By the mid-twenty-first century, USB drives with a thousand times the capacity would sell for a few tens of thousands of won; right now the price was nearly a hundred times higher, making them almost unthinkable. This was the nature of IT technology—eye-wateringly expensive at first, then gradually affordable, and eventually astonishingly cheap. Wonderful for consumers, yet terrifying for businesses: fall behind once and collapse was inevitable. Yoo Jae-won had experienced it in his previous life. The machine psychology algorithms he had developed had caused a sensation upon release, only for others to reap the rewards while superior technology soon rendered them obsolete. That was why, while preparing for regression, he had worked hardest to secure future technologies—scouring papers and patents even in unfamiliar fields and storing them in his Memory Palace. Sometimes, before sleep, he would enter the Memory Palace and review the archived materials; the sense of security was immense. Yet thinking about what would happen once the master plan ended also brought a heavy feeling. Especially recently, the technological acceleration he had triggered was proving far stronger than anticipated, advancing society faster than projected. That meant the knowledge stored in the Memory Palace might be exhausted much sooner than expected. The thought alone brought cold sweat. But the regression had already occurred, and there was no more knowledge to bring back. When the time came, he would simply have to work harder. For now, unnecessary worry could wait; the immediate task at hand took priority.
He needed to change Tiffany’s skeptical expression regarding the ten-thousand-dollar USB memory stick.
“Look. See how convenient this is. This will become the next standard auxiliary storage device.”
Yoo Jae-won plugged the USB stick into the port and began installing Android Beta. At the same moment, the control center of the ID Group data center in Coyote City grew busy. With six o’clock quitting time approaching, only the duty staff remained while everyone else prepared to leave.
“You two pulling another all-nighter? Didn’t you say you’d leave with us yesterday?”
Joseph, the data center director, who had also been preparing to depart, addressed the two young men still seated at their desks, intently working at their monitors.
“Looks like we’re just unlucky with work today…”
“Yeah. We really thought we’d finish today, but the errors keep popping up. We’re, well, you know.”
The two answered listlessly, like weary foals. They were Jerry and David, last year’s Stanford superstars and the founders of the search engine Yahoo. Their automatic indexing program, the search robot, allowed them to organize the flood of newly opened sites each day and dramatically expand the database that determined search quality. The service had earned enthusiastic praise from netizens, but the server load had quickly become impossible for students to handle, leading them to seek out Yoo Jae-won. In exchange for granting Nextcom exclusive use of their search engine, they had landed a massive four-million-dollar annual contract.
“Missing one day won’t kill you. Aren’t you pushing yourselves too hard? The sun will rise again tomorrow anyway.”
“ID Group always basks in sunlight, but for a small house like ours, the only way to catch any rays is to keep running without rest,” Jerry replied without missing a beat, even in his exhausted state.
“If people who just hit a four-million-dollar jackpot call themselves a small house, then I must be living in a mouse hole. Still, if you were my subordinates, I’d have kicked you out the door by now and told you to go home.”
Joseph spoke out of genuine concern. After Yahoo’s search engine was integrated into Nextcom’s main search page, Jerry and David had begun commuting to the Coyote City data center. The cloud servers hosting Yahoo’s engine were located here, so they logged in directly from the control room to improve stability. As the data center’s importance grew and more sites moved onto ID Cloud servers, the once-quiet control room had filled with people. Normally Jerry and David blended in among the other staff, but at quitting time they stood out clearly. Although the data center operated twenty-four hours a day, ID Group strictly enforced its eight-hour workday policy. Overtime had been common before the group structure was established, but unnecessary overtime was now thoroughly discouraged. Consequently, only a handful of duty personnel remained after hours—except for Jerry and David, who were present almost every day. That was why Joseph had spoken.
He could have forced subordinates to leave, but Jerry and David were founders of Yahoo, an independent company separate from ID Group. Several hours later—
“Ugh, I think it’s finally working properly.”
Jerry’s declaration came well past midnight, long after everyone else had gone home. Only when the moon was high and stars densely filled the night sky could the two finally lean back from their monitors and stretch.
“Still, we never figured out what caused the bug.”
“Huh? Then isn’t that an even bigger problem?”
David, who had been about to congratulate him, was startled. A bug that had appeared and disappeared without their knowledge meant a hidden time bomb inside the source code. If it detonated during live operation, the consequences would be unimaginable. This was cause for worry, not relief.
Jerry chuckled at David’s reaction and continued what he had been about to say. “I completely rewrote the counting code, so it should be fine.”
“Huh? Really?”
David was genuinely surprised. Completely rewriting the code was no small task, especially since the feature they were implementing was not simple. It could bring significant changes to Yahoo’s operations. The complexity required both of them working together for several days. Hearing that Jerry had redone everything alone was naturally shocking.
The feature they had been working so hard on was an attempt to reprocess data generated during search engine operation to create additional value. They had named it the Site Ranking System. The idea was to categorize sites, then rank those within each category. Rankings reflected site popularity. Calculating rankings based on keyword frequency, the first site visited after a keyword search, and dwell time would directly translate into advertising revenue. By quantifying advertising effectiveness with visible numbers, they could appeal to advertisers, and Yahoo would earn brokerage fees for providing the data. Jerry and David had not originally been interested in this side of the business; their strengths lay in delivering accurate, fast results and managing vast databases efficiently. Their sudden focus on revenue models had been triggered by Yoo Jae-won’s announcement of ID Group’s internal venture support policy a few weeks earlier. What struck them most was the short phrase “No pay, no gain.” At first it had felt too provocative. Netizens would likely have found it equally off-putting. Once the remark became public, criticism of Yoo Jae-won surged on 2CH.com and Nextcom’s free bulletin boards. Nextcom’s filtering system removed outright profanity, but 2CH.com had been brutal. The more they thought about it, however, the more the words rang true. Nothing in this world was free; if something provided value, it deserved compensation. Even Yahoo’s search service would have been unable to handle millions of simultaneous users without ID Technology’s cloud servers. Before Yoo Jae-won’s words, Jerry and David had believed they were already generating substantial revenue. They had a contract guaranteeing four million dollars annually from Nextcom, and the first year’s payment had already been received cleanly. Yet when they considered how long that contract might last, the outlook darkened. Several clauses in the agreement also felt like thorns in their throats—particularly the clause stating that all user-input data belonged to Nextcom. Search queries were the most valuable resource for strengthening the engine and developing additional services, but since ownership rested with Nextcom, Yahoo’s independent scope was severely limited. Only then had Jerry and David felt genuine urgency. They decided to create a revenue model independent of Nextcom and ID Group, resulting in the Page Ranking System idea.
“Heh, Jerry, at this rate you’re basically on the same level as Chairman Yoo when it comes to coding.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Me, on Chairman Yoo’s level? He’s the kind of person who can whip up an entire operating system while sitting down. I’m barely at the level of writing a single function.”
David nodded at Jerry’s words. People might badmouth the president in private, but the two never spoke ill of Yoo Jae-won; they even referred to him respectfully as “the Chairman.”
“Besides, just look at our situation. It proves he already understood the value of search query ownership in advance, doesn’t it?”
When building the Page Rank System, the most straightforward approach would have been to use search queries as the primary data source. Because query ownership belonged to Nextcom, Jerry and David had been forced to search diligently for workarounds. Fortunately, metadata generated when queries were entered into Yahoo’s engine could be shared, allowing them to construct the Page Rank System. Along the way, they had also developed various metrics and formulas for evaluating websites. Still, the inability to access raw search queries remained frustrating.
“By the way, have you made a decision?”
At David’s question, Jerry nodded. “Yeah. You were right—independence is necessary. While building the Page Rank System, I became certain that nothing is more important than user search queries.”
The decision was Yahoo’s independence. David had long advocated severing ties with Nextcom to ensure Yahoo’s continued growth, while Jerry had remained undecided. Experiencing the importance of search queries firsthand had finally settled his mind.
“Still, we can’t do it right away. Even if we have to split eventually, let’s squeeze out everything we can get from this place first.”
He added one caveat: the timing was not yet right.
“Of course.”
Though it sounded like they were plotting something sinister, the statement simply meant they would fulfill their partnership with Nextcom to the best of their ability. The longer the partnership lasted, the more ammunition they would have when they eventually went independent—the most rational choice available to them.
“Ah, it’s out.”
The Page Rank System results flashed briefly on the monitor, ending their conversation. Both men’s expressions sharpened again as they refocused on their work for Yahoo and themselves.
Several days passed. After successfully booting the iWorks prototype, Yoo Jae-won maintained close contact with component manufacturers and TG Computer, the designated OEM producer, working to refine the hardware. Even with perfect hardware, however, the system would be incomplete without a new Android operating system. Supplying new computers together with a new operating system was ideal. Convinced of this, Yoo Jae-won began clearing his surroundings to concentrate on completing Android. A tidy workspace was essential for maintaining focus.
While organizing, he first checked the legislative progress underway in both Korea and the United States.
—Washington is proceeding smoothly. Both Democrats and Republicans are taking your warning seriously, and a genuine consensus has formed. There are differences in degree between the two sides, so it will still take some time before actual bills are drafted.
Remington, President of ID Technology, reported on the American situation. Bills covering everything from personal information protection to penalties for abuse were being prepared exactly as Yoo Jae-won had intended. Since Remington was even stricter on these matters than Yoo Jae-won himself, he felt reassured.
—I’m sorry.
When he contacted Choi Kang-wook in Korea, the first words out were an apology. Unlike the smooth progress in the United States, every single issue in Korea had been contentious. Moreover, Korea had to prepare not only internet-related laws but also legislation in anticipation of OECD accession. This included punitive damages systems, class-action lawsuits, the establishment and empowerment of various regulatory bodies, and labor law revisions.
—Businesses are fiercely opposing the punitive damages and class-action provisions.
“I expected as much from them.”
—Yes, as anticipated. The real problem is the labor law.
“The labor law?”
—Yes. Opposition from the labor sector is far stronger than from businesses. It’s likely to become public news soon.
A question mark appeared in Yoo Jae-won’s mind. The labor law he had proposed was on an entirely different level from the one in his previous life. Naturally, it contained numerous worker-friendly provisions. Yet the labor sector was opposing it more strongly than businesses. It made no sense.
