1. From Seoul To Silicon: A Life in Computing

Available on Amazon:
amazon.com/dp/B0H3ZNHMD4

This 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 quiet suburbs of New Jersey. Between those two points lie more than forty years, an ocean, and a promise I once made to my mother at an airport gate.

I wrote it partly for myself, to hold on to the journey before it slips away: the punch cards and the mainframes, the CP/M machines and the DOS command lines, the Windows revolutions and the rise of the internet. But I also wrote it for my family — for my wife, Moon, and my daughter, Erin, and for the parents and brothers in Seoul who shared one roof with me in years full of dreams and hopes, and whose sacrifice sent me to America in the first place. And I wrote it 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.

When I left Korea in August 1985, my mother wept at Gimpo Airport, and I tried to comfort her the way a young man does — with a certainty I had no right to feel. “I will come back soon,” I told her, “just after I finish my schooling.” Neither of us knew that “soon” would stretch into a lifetime. Much of what follows in these pages is, in one way or another, the keeping of that promise: a career built not inside a corporation but in the field, one client and one machine at a time, in the hope of becoming the kind of person my parents had believed I could be.

If there is a single thread running through this work, it is attention — what it means to pay it fully, for forty years, to the machines and to the people who depend on them. A network that would not connect, a database that had to balance to the penny, a small business owner who needed to trust that the system would still be running on Monday morning: these were the things that filled my days. I have tried to set them down honestly, with the same care I once gave the work itself.

The story in this memoir is drawn from my own notes and from memory. Some of the exact years may not be perfect — memory is an imperfect archive, and the further back I reach, the softer the dates become — but the spirit of the story is true. Where I have been able to verify a date, I have done so; where I could not, I have trusted the version that has stayed with me.

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.