When Computers Barely Spoke Korean

Typing tutors, two-set vs three-set keyboards, and a pre-Unicode encoding war — memories of making Korean work on a computer.

A look back — long before any of the tools we argue about now.

Today’s subject is Korean — Hangul — in the world of computers. Hard to grasp now, when Windows and Mac ship with Korean by default, but maybe for that reason several memories surface. The first, naturally:

Hanme Typing Tutor

In the days when English MS-DOS and Windows handled Korean poorly, this was known as the package that made Korean usable — the program where I typed Korean to my heart’s content. Through its who-would-ever-use-these finger drills my parents first got into computers, and the crown jewel was Baenetia, a typing game. I think I saw it in the drama Reply 1994, too.

There were competitions over characters per minute; a short phrase hammered out fast could spike to a thousand a minute for a moment. Long passages meant five minutes of typing without pausing to breathe, and there was a national contest — a classmate placed third in the country, and a junior in the department placed first.

Three-Set (and Two-Set)

I can type both two-set and three-set — the two standard Hangul keyboard layouts, roughly Korea’s version of the QWERTY-versus-Dvorak split. Back when I wanted more speed, I hit a wall with two-set and, taken in by someone insisting three-set was better, I’ve used three-set 390 ever since. I made a few runs at those national-class friends, but the matches were almost always decided by penalty points for typos or by backspaces, so it hardly mattered — and with three-set, low-probability final consonants, and numbers especially, could sink you, which is why the national players were all two-set users.

Both were over 300 a minute, as I recall — useless, maybe, but a party trick. In grad school I had to write papers on the lab’s terminal, which supported only two-set, so I used both out of necessity; I still can’t tell the difference, and on my MacBook now I set it to 390. For a long time I had to fiddle with each new system, and I remember special settings on my machines even into my Google years.

Johab vs Wansung

Meaningless now, under Unicode’s reign, but a rather heated debate of the time was Johab versus Wansung — two competing ways to encode Hangul, one composing each syllable from its parts, the other cataloging finished syllables. I actually looked into it now and then when a translation job needed me to work at the code level. The high point of the whole debate was, of all things, a TV commercial.

P.S. Nearly all my Korean typing happened on the PC-communication services — Hitel, Chollian, Nownuri, the dial-up worlds before the internet. Doing anything you liked, in Korean, before the internet arrived. Come to think of it, on MS-DOS I lived without a mouse. Then Windows 95, the Saerom Data Man dialer, the internet, and StarCraft brought a different world.

Part of 90s Computer Science Stories — first-person notes on growing up with computers and studying CS in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s. See the full series →

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/54