Chapter 33
Chapter 33
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Translator: Silver Dragon
Chapter: 33
Chapter Title: Approach
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“Send me the original file. The team leader reviewed it again and says we need to make some changes.”
“Okay, sending it now.”
“Thanks.”
Ding.
Henry confirmed the small note pop up in the bottom right of his monitor right as the alert sounded. He clicked his mouse to check it.
'To think I tried not to use this... I must've been crazy.'
Henry waited a moment for the file from his colleague Gail, seated next to him, to open after clicking it.
People from the 21st century might complain about how slow it was, but to Henry right now, the scene unfolding before his eyes felt like a whole new world.
It was like the shock of dinosaurs bursting onto the screen in last year's blockbuster Jurassic Park.
'No floppy disks needed to send files? This is a revolution!'
Finally, the file from Gail opened. As Henry reviewed and edited the document inside, he could hardly believe what had just happened in such a short time.
He'd even be willing to plant a kiss on the CEO of the company that created the Byte Line code responsible for this miracle, if he ever met them.
Byte Line.
It was the program his company had recently started using.
At first,
'What, another new thing we have to use? The higher-ups really don't give a damn about the people down here doing the actual work.'
As a developer, Henry had been fed up with the constant company directives to adopt new programs or technologies.
New software and tech popped up every other day, and as a developer, he couldn't afford not to learn them. The endless stream of things to master had worn him down.
But Byte Line was different.
'A chat program? What's this—why is it so fast?!'
Henry had prior experience with WaffleTalk, the chat program pre-installed on Wacintosh machines.
Back then, sending even simple text took an eternity, so he'd sworn off chat programs forever.
But with Byte Line, text appeared instantly on the recipient's end the moment you typed it in the chat window—and receiving was just as quick. It was incredibly convenient.
Thanks to it, the dev team on the third floor could handle business with the planning team on the fourth without ever leaving their desks, just via chat.
And with file attachments possible, no more fumbling with floppy disks for quick shares.
The pointless time wasted daily swapping disks in and out was gone, and he could feel the boost in work efficiency with every fiber of his being.
'They tried to block it over "security risks"? Waffle and Minisoft are real scum.'
Remembering how his company had been late to adopt Byte Line—already in use elsewhere—made Henry's blood boil.
The two giants dominating the PC OS market, Waffle and Minisoft, had pressured partners by refusing liability for issues arising from third-party chat apps besides their own pre-installed ones.
That hesitation had kept some companies from using Byte Line.
But IBM's near-declaration of war—"Byte Line runs on internal networks, so if there's a problem, own up to it being Waffle or Minisoft's fault"—changed everything. Now, hardly any company avoided it.
“Savior? Negotiate with them anyway and bring us Byte Line, no matter what.”
“Skelly, every company that's approached them has been turned down.”
“That's why you're in that position—to make the impossible happen.”
Miles couldn't hide his frustration at Skelly's "make it happen somehow" demand.
James Skelly had taken the helm at Waffle after founders Stevi Polson and Wozniak left.
'He's not a manager—he's just a merchant. He only cares about short-term profits, not the company's future...'
Of course, pursuing profit as CEO wasn't inherently bad.
Polson, ousted a few years back, had nearly tanked the company by viewing everything through a pure developer's lens rather than a business one.
The issue was Skelly's obsessive focus on profit alone.
“Oracle tried to buy Savior outright last time and failed.”
“Oracle? Those moneybags acted stingy, huh.”
“They offered $200 million.”
“What?!”
Bang.
Skelly was so shocked he fell off his chair. Miles, watching, could understand the reaction to some extent.
'Even I was stunned when I first heard the number...'
But after digging into Savior's data later, Miles realized $200 million was actually undervalued.
“We don't need a game company. We just want the Byte Line program. If we target only that, couldn't we buy it cheap?”
Regaining his composure, Skelly sat back down and suggested focusing on the program alone.
“Even for just that, another company offered $30 million.”
“And?”
“They said absolutely no sale.”
Bang!
'That's what I said from the start.'
Watching Skelly slam the desk this time, Miles thought he'd have a headache for a while.
Unlike Miles, who believed cooperating with Savior's Byte Line creators was the best path,
Skelly would surely demand ways to seize it somehow.
“Haa... This is hopeless.”
The Byte Line frenzy wasn't limited to Waffle.
Minisoft, holding over 70% of the PC OS market, was also in turmoil over it.
'Mr. Heights is just too proud.'
Bill Heights.
Minisoft's founder and a living legend in IT.
Having dropped out of college to start the company and become a billionaire in his twenties, he was a household name across America.
His employees, though, were dying inside.
'How do I explain why this isn't working?'
Being a genius himself, Bill Heights often held his staff to the same impossible standards.
His latest decree to the software dev department was a prime example.
'Explain why our MiniPopup performs worse than some other company's program!'
The staff felt wronged but understood Heights' frustration.
Running on Minisoft's own Window OS, no one knew it better than their dev team.
Yet they were losing performance to a rival program on their home turf.
From the CEO's view, it was infuriating.
'But the guy who made this is insane—what can we do?!'
The dev team had no choice but to feel aggrieved.
They'd spent a full week dissecting how Byte Line transmitted text faster than their MiniPopup or WaffleTalk—and even handled file attachments.
The conclusion?
'This wasn't made by a human.'
While legacy chat apps relied on TCP via central servers, Byte Line used a custom UDP-based protocol on a novel structure.
It even leveraged multithreading to handle thousands of simultaneous users effortlessly.
'It's not that we didn't know—we couldn't do it even if we did!'
Any developer knew Savior's approach was efficient and performant, but redesigning protocols and architecture from scratch was brutally hard and time-consuming. They'd all abandoned it.
Asking Minisoft's team to replicate it now would take at least three years.
'Haa... Whatever. If I get fired, maybe I'll head to Savior.'
For the first time, the team that had always pushed through Heights' orders felt utter defeat.
“We'll meet every dev studio on the list in person.”
“Understood. I'll contact them right away and schedule.”
“You know this, but make damn sure none of this leaks.”
“Yes, sir. I'll instruct the devs to keep their mouths shut.”
The Japanese megacorp Uni.
Uni housed a division called the Information Processing Research Lab.
Publicly known as a hub for researching future tech.
In truth, it was Uni's home console manufacturing project team.
'Time to show those arrogant Nendo bastards what we're made of!'
Uni had long eyed the console market, mainly for CD-ROMs.
The next-gen storage medium, co-developed with Philips, offered vastly more capacity than floppies or cartridges, drawing massive attention.
With few uses for the young tech yet, Uni partnered with Nendo to try CDs for games.
But
-CDs are ridiculously stupid. Slower than our ROM cartridges and prone to breaking!
Nendo unilaterally ended talks mid-collaboration, even trash-talking Uni and CDs at a trade show. Uni couldn't stomach it.
Nendo might be console emperor, but Uni dwarfed them as a corporation. The humiliation enraged the chairman and every employee.
“Director, any dev you want to schedule first?”
“Hmm... Savior. I'd like to meet them first.”
“Got it. Savior as top priority.”
To avenge Nendo's slight, Uni was diving into consoles themselves.
And Uni was now approaching Savior.