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Abstract
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From Seoul to Silicon is the memoir of Heon Yook, a Korean-born technologist who arrived in America with a graduate student’s visa, a background in mainframes, and a conviction that the personal computer was about to change everything. It did. And so did he.
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Spanning more than four decades, this is the story of a career built not inside a corporation but in the field: one client, one network, one database at a time.
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From the green-screen terminals of CP/M and the command-line discipline of MS-DOS, through the Novell NetWare networks that connected hundreds of users in the LG Building in New Jersey, through the Windows revolution, the rise of SQL Server, and the migration of commerce to the internet, Yook was there — installing, training, building, and solving.
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His clients were Korean-owned restaurants, insurance agencies, spas, pharmacists, CPA, and small businesses in New York and New Jersey, and what he gave them was not just software but the confidence to run their operations on it.
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The book is also a record of what that work cost — decades of screen time that left a permanent mark on his eyesight — and of what sustained it: a passion for classical music and opera, long rides on an electric bicycle through the streets of northern New Jersey, and the quiet satisfaction of a collection of vintage machines that now live on at Yookstore, where the hardware of a lifetime finds new homes.
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From Seoul to Silicon is, in the end, a story about attention: what it means to pay it fully, for forty years, to the machines and the people who depend on them.
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Preface
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This small book is the story of my career in computer service and consulting — a career that began before I ever touched a real computer, in a university classroom in Seoul, South Korea, and ended decades later in the suburbs of New Jersey.
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I wrote it partly for myself, to remember the journey: the punch cards and the mainframes, the CP/M machines and the DOS command lines, the Windows revolutions and the rise of the internet.
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I wrote it also for anyone curious about what it was like to live and work through the entire personal computer era, from its primitive beginnings to today's cloud-connected world.
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The data in this memoir is drawn from my own notes and memory. Some of the exact years may not be perfect — memory is an imperfect archive — but the spirit of the story is accurate. Where I have been able to verify dates, I have done so.
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After retiring from active client work, I now run Yookstore, an online store selling vintage computing software, hardware, and accessories that accumulated over my career. These are not just items for sale; they are artifacts of an era.
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"These aren't just 'items' to me — they are the physical milestones of my career. They represent late nights spent troubleshooting, the evolution of the digital age, and the craftsmanship of a different era of computing."
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My Parents: The Foundation Beneath Everything
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Before there was a career, before there was a marriage, before there was a daughter or a son-in-law, there were my parents. Everything I have built in America rests on a foundation they laid in Korea — through sacrifice, through service, and through a quiet, steady belief that their son’s education was worth more than their own comfort.
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I am grateful, beyond what words can carry, that my parents made the decision to send me to America to study. Our family was not wealthy.
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My parents were not rich enough to easily support the cost of an American graduate school education — the tuition, the living expenses, the distance, the years away from home. And yet, they made it possible. They found a way.
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They saw to it that I completed my schooling, even when supporting that path required real sacrifice on their part.
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That choice — to invest everything in their son’s future across the ocean — is the gift on which the rest of my life was built. The career chronicled in these pages, the home in New Jersey, the family Moon and I raised here, the legacy I am now leaving — none of it would exist without that early, costly act of love and faith. I owe them more than I can ever express.
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I am deeply grateful to my parents for sending me to America to study. Everything that followed in my life was built on that one decision. |