Time passed quickly, like the wind in the winter. He spent almost all his free time working on the OS. It was truly a terrible age to learn, especially for him, since he had lived his past life with the Internet, where he could learn basically anything he could ever want. Now, he had to read books to research something so small! Still, he endured. He also had to teach Eve how to code. He had searched for books to use as material, but they were far too outdated for his taste. So he wrote his own and taught her.

  For William and Eve, time seemed to pass pleasantly.

  1992, March 7th

  William was now twelve. He had mastered 8 languages. In addition to his previously learned languages, such as English, French, German, all four versions of Japanese, and Korean, he had also learned Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish. His skill, Languages, had also expanded to cover his mastery of programming languages such as Assembly, C, C++, and finally Python. Python only appeared in February 1991, so he inferred that the language would only appear when it was released to the public. That also explained to him why HTML or JavaScript hadn't appeared yet.

  The expansion of the skill, Language, to the programming languages only occurred when it finally reached LV4. It seemed that the language level could drag up other languages he had neglected. For example, he reached LV4 in Language after he learned Latin. As soon as he reached it, his understanding of Latin was dragged up, along with all his other languages. It was quite fascinating.

  William stood up and stretched. Finally! I've finished the beta. It's ready for a limited release. He grinned. The OS wasn't complete yet. Very far from completion, actually. It was so far away it might as well be on another continent. But for now, it was usable. He had already implemented all the basic features he wanted to implement in this limited release. For example, he included multimedia support and better memory handling. He also included some really basic apps like Calculator, Notes, Draw, File Manager, and Task Manager. Note was like if Notepad++ and Word fused. Draw was a mix between Paint and Photoshop. What was really interesting was that he made his file formatting system NTFS. He laughed in his mind.

  A full year before the NTFS actually released! He laughed again. While he wanted to include more features, he couldn't due to hardware constraints. It was very distressing for him to create an Operating System with too many limitations. Still, he did it! He ran and called over Eve, who came over immediately after she heard that he was going to discuss the project with her.

  Eve sat down on the chair in front of the table as William sat on the sofa just beside her. "So, what do you think?"

  She nodded, "It's very smooth. And I like the GUI. It's quite sleek and very... minimalistic? It looks really neat."

  "Thank you. I worked really hard on it," he smiled. "What about the apps?"

  She nodded and opened a random app. It was Notes. She used it for a while before giving her thoughts, "Your app has a lot of fonts. I've never seen fonts like this before. Did you develop your own font?"

  "Yep."

  "That's pretty cool. I also like the variety of functions available here. I like that I can center my paragraphs, and I like that I can make them all aligned."

  William rested his arms on the chair's back. "Yeah. So what do you think? I'm thinking we release this version first as a demo."

  "Demo? Why?" She frowned as she asked.

  He explained, "You see, I'm not releasing anything commercially until I'm 18. So I'm releasing this as a limited tech demo to universities. You know, to build our brand. We don't technically 'exist' yet, but we can make a name for ourselves before we actually 'exist'."

  She nodded as her eyes brightened, "I see. That's really smart. But how're you going to send them?"

  William drummed his fingers on the chair, "Good question. Email's useless for this. The files are way too large. This is around 15 to 20 megabytes compressed."

  She frowned, "That's... a lot. How many floppy disks would that be?"

  "Around 12, give or take." He shook his head, "Which is exactly why we're not gonna use them unless we absolutely need to. I'm gonna set up an FTP server."

  "FTP?"

  "File Transfer Protocol. It's how people distribute large software right now. Universities have good internet connections, so they can download directly from our server." He pulled out a notebook and started scribbling, "I'll rent a server space, set up FTP, and send emails to universities' computer science departments with download instructions."

  Eve's eyes followed his scribbles, "But won't that be expensive? And I'm assuming they could trace this back to us."

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  He grinned, "Yes, it'll cost money. But I've been investing my trust fund gains pretty carefully. We have more than enough to do this. As for tracing, we'll be using a PO Box in another city for the business address, pay for server hosting through money orders, and keep everything under our company name."

  Her eyes brightened as she looked straight into his mismatched eyes, "Oh, yes. Do we have a name already?"

  He nodded, "Quantum Innovation. Grand, isn't it?"

  She rolled her eyes as she smiled, "Stop being a narcissist, William. On the other hand, I like the name."

  "Right?" He stood up straight, "And by the time we turn 18 and legally register our company, Quantum Innovation will already have years of reputation. People will have been using our OS, and know about it. And by that time, I'd imagine our product will be miles ahead of the competition."

  Eve gave him a thumbs-up, "I like that. What about the emails? Have you written it?"

  William nodded as he motioned for her to get up, "Yeah. Look at this." He sat down and pulled up the draft email, "I intentionally made it vague about who we are. And I made sure to emphasize that this is for educational and research purposes. I also mentioned that this doesn't contain half of the features that are planned to be added in the full release version."

  She read it over two times, "Seems fine. And I just noticed. Your OS seems to handle files a lot faster than usual. What is that?"

  He grinned, "This is the real innovation of this OS. It's used using the NTFS file management system, which is a lot more efficient than what's currently used on a lot of Operating Systems."

  She frowned, "You didn't mention this in the mail."

  "That's right. They'll find out about it themselves."

  She tilted her head, "Is NTFS that significant?"

  "Very." William nodded, "The current systems, like FAT, have serious limitations. NTFS handles larger files, has better security, and more reliability. When those computer science professors see this working smoothly on a demo OS from an unknown company, they'll want to know who we are, which will drive sales up when we finally register our company and release it."

  "I see. So you're betting this will be the next step to file management?"

  "Yes. I already have an idea on how to improve NTFS and create an even better one, but current hardware isn't good enough. Anyway, I'm gonna send the emails now."

  "Wait, you've already set up the FTP?"

  "Did it yesterday, actually."

  "So, who are we actually sending this to?" She rested her arm on his shoulder.

  "MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, CalTech, and Princeton."

  "What about Usenet groups, and BBS archives? If we hit comp.os.*, comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware, and some university mirrors, it'll spread."

  He froze, "Why didn't I think about that? That's actually genius. That'll catapult our name even further." He gave a thumbs-up to Eve. I actually didn't think about that. That's embarrassing.

  She nodded, satisfied, "I'll post it for you. I know, like, hundreds of BBSes and a few Usenet altfeeds."

  He smiled, "You're a lifesaver, Eve. Thank you."

  "Don't mention it. We're in this together. I've also almost completed my part."

  "If I'm correct, you're doing GUI right now. So the full thing's almost finished?"

  "Well, kinda. It runs very slowly. It needs a lot of optimization. And I suck at it."

  He sighed, "Don't worry, my Eve. I'll deal with the optimization. Just give it to me after you're done, alright?"

  "You've got it."

  Both William and Eve stayed in the room for several more hours. He sent the emails immediately, and they both were playing on their handheld Game Boys while monitoring the server logs. After three hours, they finally noticed new lines of text had appeared.

  Mar 7 16:47 world ftpd[10432]: connection from mit.edu (18.62.0.1)

  Mar 7 16:48 world ftpd[10432]: ANONYMOUS FTP login ok,

  Mar 7 16:49 world ftpd[10432]: RETR qos-0.5-complete.tar.Z (15276 KB)

  Mar 7 16:51 world ftpd[10432]: transfer complete, 15276 KB in 78 secs (197 KB/s)

  He slapped Eve's shoulder, "Hey. MIT's finally downloading it. Whoa, their Ethernet's really fast. 197 KB/s? Especially so because their internet is shared between a lot of devices there."

  She glared at him, "I lost my Tetris high score because of you."

  He ignored her and continued laughing like a madman. More lines of texts appeared over the next hours.

  Mar 7 17:05 world ftpd[10445]: connection from stanford.edu (38.8.0.5)

  Mar 7 17:06 world ftpd[10445]: ANONYMOUS FTP login ok,

  Mar 7 17:07 world ftpd[10445]: RETR qos-0.5-complete.tar.Z (15276 KB)

  Mar 7 17:10 world ftpd[10445]: transfer complete, 15276 KB in 93 secs (164 KB/s)

  Mar 7 17:20 world ftpd[10457]: connection from cmu.edu (128.2.0.3)

  Mar 7 17:21 world ftpd[10457]: ANONYMOUS FTP login ok,

  Mar 7 17:22 world ftpd[10457]: RETR qos-0.5-complete.tar.Z (15276 KB)

  Mar 7 17:24 world ftpd[10457]: transfer complete, 15276 KB in 86 secs (177 KB/s)

  Mar 7 17:35 world ftpd[10463]: connection from berkeley.edu (128.32.0.7)

  Mar 7 17:36 world ftpd[10463]: ANONYMOUS FTP login ok,

  Mar 7 17:37 world ftpd[10463]: RETR qos-0.5-complete.tar.Z (15276 KB)

  Mar 7 17:39 world ftpd[10463]: transfer complete, 15276 KB in 90 secs (170 KB/s)

  Mar 7 17:50 world ftpd[10470]: connection from caltech.edu (131.215.0.4)

  Mar 7 17:51 world ftpd[10470]: ANONYMOUS FTP login ok,

  Mar 7 17:52 world ftpd[10470]: RETR qos-0.5-complete.tar.Z (15276 KB)

  Mar 7 17:54 world ftpd[10470]: transfer complete, 15276 KB in 87 secs (176 KB/s)

  Mar 7 18:14 world ftpd[10478]: connection from princeton.edu (128.112.0.2)

  Mar 7 18:15 world ftpd[10478]: ANONYMOUS FTP login ok,

  Mar 7 18:16 world ftpd[10478]: RETR qos-0.5-complete.tar.Z (15276 KB)

  Mar 7 18:18 world ftpd[10478]: transfer complete, 15276 KB in 87 secs (175 KB/s)

  "HAHA. All of them downloaded it." William laughed out loud.

  Eve nodded, "That's better than I expected. I'll start posting on BBSes and Usenet groups tomorrow."

  As William was about to agree, they heard Sarah's voice from downstairs, "Master William, Miss Eve, Dinner's ready!"

  Eve stood up and grabbed him by the end as she grabbed both of their Game Boys with one hand and threw them on his bed, "Come on. Let's go eat. The downloads are not going to continue whether you are watching or not."

  William was helpless as he was dragged along. Nevertheless, he grinned. He loved spending time with his best friend, even more than working on his projects.