People use the term "global standard" when talking about worldwide benchmarks. A standard means a "norm." A standard is a promise that spans the economy, industry and technology. Technological progress can create a need for a "standard," but a single standard can also drive a leap akin to a revolution. Based on a survey of experts from industry, academia, research and the media, the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards and ChosunBiz selected the "top 10 standards that changed the world" and the "top 10 standards that changed the lives and economy of Koreans," and reexamine the role of standards. [Editor's note]
Samsung Electronics switched the default keyboard to "QWERTY" starting with the Galaxy S24 series released last year. It previously used its own "Cheonjiin" as the default, but accepted Generation Z's demand that QWERTY is more familiar and convenient.
People feel familiar with QWERTY because its layout is the same as the national standard two-set Korean computer keyboard. The United States developed QWERTY in the 1800s and spread it worldwide. The Korean government then adopted the two-set as the standard for Hangul keyboards in 1982. The two-set is similar to QWERTY in that the left hand inputs consonants and the right hand inputs vowels. The number and symbol layouts are also almost identical.
Korea began grappling with Hangul keyboard layouts in the 1950s as typewriters became more widespread. In English, letters are strung in a line to form words and sentences. In contrast, Hangul uses a "block composition" method in which an initial consonant, a medial vowel and a final consonant combine to form one syllable block. Also, while there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, Hangul includes double consonants such as ㅃ, ㄲ, ㅆ and compound vowels such as ㅟ and ㅘ, so the number of syllables that must be possible to input exceeds 10,000.
The two-set keyboard places Hangul consonants and vowels on top of QWERTY. As a result, a new method was introduced to express the larger number of Korean syllables compared with English. For example, to input a double consonant, you press the consonant together with Shift. For compound vowels formed by combining multiple vowels, you press each vowel one by one to input them.
Another feature of the two-set keyboard is that frequently used characters are grouped in the second row. For example, among consonants, the commonly used ㅁ, ㄴ, ㅇ, ㄹ and ㅎ are on the left second row, and among vowels, ㅗ, ㅓ, ㅏ and ㅣ are on the right second row. They are placed in the middle so fingers do not have to travel far.
As keyboard layouts that differed by manufacturer were unified, people could quickly adapt to any computer they bought. Standardizing the keyboard accelerated the spread of computers and the pace of computerization.
Meanwhile, in the 1990s, when computers became popularized, a problem arose in which Hangul stored in electronic documents became garbled. To resolve this, development of the "Unicode" standard, which manages all characters worldwide with standardized codes, was pursued. Korea participated in this project, set as a national standard the codes that recognize 11,172 modern Hangul syllables as individual characters, and had this reflected in the international standard as well. Old Hangul and dialectal notation were later included.