Seollal Blessings
Almost a month had passed since Yoo Jae-won returned from America. School was fast approaching, yet a sliver of breathing room remained. Classes did not begin the moment February arrived. Graduation and entrance ceremonies still lay ahead, along with a brief one-week spring break. The real semester would not start until March, so there was no cause to mourn the end of the long winter vacation.
During the month since his return from the American business trip, Yoo Jae-won had worked tirelessly to convert the gains he had secured in the United States into capabilities fully owned by his company. First, he opened a dedicated server at the ID Technology California branch that ran around the clock. He paid the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority for a legitimate IP address, ensuring the FTP service remained permanently accessible. He would have preferred a domain name in addition to the numeric IP, but the internet had not yet reached the point where the World Wide Web even existed. Without so much as Gopher, which had been comparable to PC communications, he had to be content with operating FTP over an IP address. With a capable development team assembled, he could eventually build WWW servers and clients if time allowed, but the immediate priority was to maximize the technology already in hand.
The private server freed Yoo Jae-won from CompuServe’s unreliable FTP. It also connected him directly to the ID Software team in Texas and the development team in San Francisco. The San Francisco branch had undergone significant change as well. The most striking development was that the number of employees reporting to the office every day had already risen to fifteen. Shannon Cruz, who had served as Remington’s secretary during his detective days, was the first person hired. The decision carried one hundred percent of Remington’s personal interest, yet Yoo Jae-won understood completely. Shannon had worked alongside Remington for nearly five years and was also his devoted lover. In his previous life the two had eventually married. Even after Remington’s detective agency collapsed, she had waited for him. Those had been difficult years, but they had leaned on each other and endured. When the IT boom later showered them with sudden wealth, it seemed Remington’s golden age had arrived—until misfortune struck close to home. The IT collapse wiped out much of their fortune, and on top of that Shannon died in a car accident. The shock drove Remington to religion. None of that tragedy would happen now, but no one could support Remington as effectively as Shannon, so Yoo Jae-won accepted the arrangement without hesitation.
Eight additional mid-level managers with ten years of experience and programmers with four or five years in Silicon Valley were also brought on board. Vincent Greenhill, formerly of the New York Stock Exchange, was recruited as well. Yoo Jae-won instructed him to begin preparing for oil futures trading and entrusted him with a hundred-thousand-dollar account to test his investment instincts. He told Remington to focus on scouting the remaining two candidates, though both had so far declined—either citing the offered compensation or personal reasons—so the outlook was not especially promising.
Even the current number of programmers fell short of Yoo Jae-won’s target. Nevertheless, once the new hires completed their onboarding and were ready for development work, ID Technology’s programming capacity had effectively doubled or tripled. ID Software was also progressing smoothly. The team had finished adapting the Keyboard Warrior engine for Wolfenstein and had moved on to stage construction. The pace was remarkably fast, thanks to two factors. First, Yoo Jae-won’s source code was written in an intuitive, modular style that made modification straightforward. Second, John Carmack’s genius was gradually awakening. Once the Wolfenstein engine was complete, level designer John Romero took the lead on stage building while John began work on the game library Yoo Jae-won had assigned him. Drawing on the vast techniques Yoo Jae-won had demonstrated and the various methods used during Wolfenstein’s development, John was organizing everything under the name Glide X. His genius was unmistakably emerging: he divided the library into three specialized components—Glide Graphics, Glide Interactive Sound, and Glide Controller—rather than leaving it as a single monolithic package. The library included not only the source code but also example programs explaining how each component worked, allowing even novice programmers to apply the tools with ease.
The Silicon Valley development team had begun work on the office suite alongside Yoo Jae-won. Notably, not a single line of code or icon had been created yet. What passed between them were not source files but large volumes of documents and image files. The four completed office programs were expected to total several hundred thousand lines of code—a mammoth undertaking. Yoo Jae-won, well aware of the difficulty of coordinating such a project among many programmers, decided to establish the overall architecture and coding standards before actual development began. He defined naming conventions for functions and variables, standardized comment syntax, and—most critically—specified how user data would be structured and stored internally. The work was tedious but indispensable.
Yoo Jae-won supplied detailed images showing both the overall appearance and every fine detail of the finished office suite. The images were rendered with such precision that they resembled screenshots taken on a Macintosh II. The sight of the Ribbon Interface in action was nothing short of shocking. The ribbon—its signature feature—did far more than display the Start button and taskbar at the bottom. Clicking any top-level menu such as File, Edit, View, or Format instantly changed the ribbon beneath it, revealing the menu’s functions as icons. That capability alone lay beyond the imagination of anyone in this era. Equally unprecedented was the ability to open multiple documents on the taskbar and switch between them fluidly. Most revolutionary of all, however, was the capacity to run Word, Spreadsheet, Database, and Presentation simultaneously while sharing data across them. Copying a formatted table from Spreadsheet directly into Word, or transferring Word formatting into a Presentation, represented technology that transcended the times. When the team learned that even data copied to another program would update automatically if edited in its original application, Mario Rogers—the ten-year veteran hired as a mid-level manager—nearly fell over in astonishment.
The feature seemed impossible until Yoo Jae-won explained that it could be implemented through the Dynamic Object Manager he had designed. Once everyone understood exactly what they were building, enthusiasm surged. They could hardly wait to create the magnificent program with their own hands. The sobering news was that Yoo Jae-won had already completed roughly half of the core functionality himself. He had been working on it whenever time permitted since the previous year, including the Dynamic Object Manager and the essential shared functions for file saving, loading, searching, compression, and sorting. Uploading the finished source code to the Silicon Valley office server would have meant one-third of the project was already done—except for one critical obstacle. Yoo Jae-won had originally intended to recruit programmers domestically and had therefore written all comments in Korean. That had been a mistake. The domestic recruitment drive, conducted over the long period of his American trip, had yielded no suitable candidates. He had eventually removed the job posting. Now he had no choice but to work with the Silicon Valley team, none of whom spoke Korean. Every comment therefore had to be translated into English.
The volume of work was considerable. Yoo Jae-won’s coding speed was terrifying—five hundred keystrokes per minute, sustained for hours without a single typo. The secret behind that monstrous pace lay in the Memory Palace: he was simply transcribing code he had already memorized. Even so, sections he had not prepared in his previous life required original creation and slowed him down slightly. Thanks to that small advantage, the source code already written amounted to a full forty thousand lines. While converting the comments to English he was also reviewing and optimizing the code. The task was substantial, yet for the monster that was Yoo Jae-won it was merely a matter of time. With Choi Kang-wook and Remington handling company affairs smoothly, he could focus on the translation without interruption.
While Yoo Jae-won worked on translation and optimization, the Silicon Valley team did not sit idle. Daily meetings allowed everyone to brainstorm ways to improve the office suite. Useful ideas were immediately transferred to whiteboards and refined into concrete specifications; some algorithms were even prototyped. Mario Rogers, the mid-level manager directing the effort, assigned tasks according to each person’s strengths and set milestones leading to the projected completion date. Even in a small-scale environment, nothing was left to chance. With no managerial issues to distract him, Yoo Jae-won’s own pace accelerated. He had expected to finish within three days—until an unforeseen complication delayed him. The interruption was not caused by friends arriving unannounced or by any sudden accident. It was the sudden arrival of Seollal.
Seollal, together with Chuseok, was one of the nation’s two greatest holidays. In 1989 it was still called Gujeong. The government, determined to eradicate old customs, recognized only the solar New Year as an official holiday, so Seollal was not even a red-letter day. Nevertheless, the people of Deokjin-ri treated Gujeong as the true Seollal and celebrated with boisterous festivities. Yoo Jae-won’s household and his maternal relatives’ home were no exception.
On the morning of February 6, Seollal, Yoo Jae-won and his parents dressed in new clothes and went to the main family house to observe the ancestral rites. Neither Yoo Jae-won nor his mother, Kim Mal-sook, were devout believers; both had attended church with ulterior motives. Out of respect for the kindhearted pastor, however, they participated only as observers. In earlier years their attendance had sparked religious friction with his uncle, aunt, and other relatives, but those tensions had long since vanished. Even though Kim Mal-sook’s busy schedule prevented her from helping much with the ritual table, no one complained. The reason was simple: through Yoo Jae-won the main house and the extended family had reaped substantial economic benefits.
The main house had been too wary to invest directly in ID Technology and had instead lent money to Yoo Bong-man, who used six million won of it for the investment. At the time that sum had been precious, though Yoo Jae-won now dealt in hundreds of millions. When dividends arrived, Yoo Bong-man distributed the money among the relatives who had lent it. He declared he would continue doing so with every future dividend, while retaining all voting rights through a formal power of attorney granted to his son. Though relations were currently harmonious, the arrangement eliminated any future disputes over shares. The relatives had lent the money believing it might never be recovered; now that it returned in large annual sums, they were thoroughly satisfied.
Moreover, the ancestral mountain had struck gold. Following Yoo Jae-won’s instructions, they had entrusted the transaction to Hwang Jae-hong, the toad-like man. At the start of the new year the provincial government announced a road construction plan, and part of the Yoo family’s ancestral mountain was designated for a tunnel. History had repeated itself—except for one crucial difference. Instead of selling the mountain outright to Hwang Jae-hong, they had merely granted him authority to handle the deal. Hwang Jae-hong exercised his full negotiating skill and secured compensation well above the government’s initial offer: thirty million won. The land had originally been valued at only a few hundred won per pyeong; thanks to Hwang Jae-hong it had risen to a thousand won per pyeong. After paying Hwang Jae-hong a suitable commission, a considerable sum remained. The uncle divided half of it among Yoo Bong-man and the other siblings and relatives, setting the rest aside for reinvestment—meaning, of course, further investment in Yoo Jae-won. The relatives agreed unanimously. Those who received their share were already preparing to invest in any new ventures Yoo Jae-won might launch.
Consequently, when Yoo Jae-won paid New Year’s respects to his uncle and the other relatives, every face beamed as they pressed generous Sebaetdon into his hands. The gifts were ten-thousand-won notes bearing the portrait of King Sejong. Yoo Jae-won handed the money to his parents, who in turn distributed it among the uncles, cousins, and older cousins who had come to pay their own respects. The cousins who had earlier pouted at receiving only one- or five-thousand-won notes from their own parents quickly brightened once they each received several ten-thousand-won bills from Yoo Jae-won’s mother and father. It was a perfect example of virtuous circulation.