From Seoul To Silicon: A Life in Computing

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.

The story begins not in Silicon Valley but in a classroom at Hanyang University in Seoul, in 1979. Newly returned from his mandatory service in the Korean Army, Yook took his first lessons in what was then called EDPS - Electronic Data Processing System - writing Fortran and COBOL by hand on coding sheets and waiting overnight for the punch-card operators to feed them into a mainframe that he himself would never touch. From those earliest lessons in how a machine could be made to think, the rest of a life in computing would follow.

Two years later, in January 1981, he received his first paycheck from Gold Star Semiconductor - a small envelope of cash, no more than about 240,000 won, counted into his hand. He carried it home and placed it in his mother's hands, and from that month until the day he left Korea he did the same with every envelope that followed. He worked at Gold Star for five years on the Seoul tech frontier - CP/M, dBASE, the green-screen days when computing was still a frontier - sharing a house with his parents and three brothers, Dal, Cheol, and June, in years he would later describe as full of dreams and hopes for better lives.

In August 1985 he left for America on what was, in truth, his third crossing of the Pacific - but unlike the company assignments of 1982 and 1984, this journey was entirely his own. His parents saw him off at Gimpo International Airport. His mother quietly wept; he tried to comfort her with a son's certainty - "I will come back soon, just after I finish my schooling" - a promise none of them then knew would stretch into decades. The flight carried him through Narita to JFK, where no one was waiting. He took a taxi east to Long Island, arrived at the Stony Brook dormitory at early evening, found every cafeteria closed, and ate his first American dinner - Coca-Cola and snacks - from a vending machine glowing in an empty hallway. He had arrived a day early; a resident assistant unlocked a utility room with a small sofa, and he slept there beside his suitcase, the first night of his American life. A few days later he opened the first bank account he had ever held in his name, at Long Island Savings Bank near campus - a small printed passbook that became, in its quiet way, his first sign of taking root.

What followed was a career spanning more than four decades, built not inside a corporation but in the field: one client, one network, one database at a time. 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. His clients were Korean-owned restaurants, insurance agencies, spas, pharmacists, CPAs, and small businesses across New York and New Jersey, and what he gave them was not just software but the confidence to run their operations on it.