The Gift of Keyboard Warrior
Yoo Jae-won, the money tree, had always thought his mother was an extraordinary woman. In 1988, she was the kind of person who would buy a computer with a color monitor just for educational purposes—something he believed no one else in the world would do. But there was another person like that. No, this one went even further. He never expected someone to buy a 386 for a kid who knew nothing about computers. The main unit alone must have cost nearly five million won, yet Su-gyeong’s family had bought it without hesitation. They really were wealthy. Daeho Computers was impressive too. They probably hadn’t even stocked a model like this. They must have rushed to build it after the order came in, yet the delivery arrived in no time.
“Daebak? What does daebak mean?”
Oh no. He had been trying his best to avoid using twenty-first-century slang or casual expressions so he wouldn’t stand out, but the unexpected 386 had made him slip.
“It means something’s really good. Like getting a huge ship for free. That kind of feeling.”
“Huh? It wasn’t free. You said it was expensive.”
Right. Su-gyeong’s family had paid a lot. But for Yoo Jae-won, who now had a 386 right in front of him, it was definitely a huge win. The trip to Seoul took time, but now the machine was right next door.
“Anyway, it’s incredibly good. Have you tried turning it on?”
“Yeah! Of course.”
“Want to try it now?”
At Jae-won’s suggestion, Su-gyeong nodded and approached the computer, looking it over. After hesitating between the power button on the main unit and the one on the monitor, she pressed the monitor button first. Then she just stood there.
“You have to turn on the main unit too.”
“Huh? This one too?”
Following Jae-won’s explanation, she powered on the main unit. The disk drive checked itself, then the hard drive, accompanied by the familiar clicking sounds. The BIOS POST appeared on the monitor. Fortunately, DOS was already installed on the hard drive, so the boot process finished quickly.
“Do you know how to shut it down properly?”
“Just do the opposite, right?”
What on earth had the Daeho Electronics installation team taught her yesterday? At the very least, they should have explained basic power-on and power-off procedures. Shutting it down like that would destroy an expensive hard drive in no time. Within days, bad sectors would spread like cancer cells.
“You need to park the hard drive first.”
Yoo Jae-won patiently taught Su-gyeong the fundamentals of using a computer. Aside from her initial nervousness around the unfamiliar machine, she was a quick learner. Anything she couldn’t memorize easily, he wrote down on memo paper—just like he had once done with DOS commands.
“This is a gift.”
Only after the basic setup was complete did Jae-won pull something out of his bag: the Korean version of Keyboard Warrior 1.0. It was the full package, just like the one he had given to the chairman of Sambo Computers, complete with his signature in permanent marker.
“Whoa! Daebak!”
The word had already spread to Su-gyeong. He really needed to watch his mouth around kids. Thanking him, she grabbed the large package and suddenly bolted out of the room.
“Dad! Mom! Jae-won gave this to me as a present!”
She really was a handful. When she returned, her parents were with her. They looked genuinely surprised by the gift. They had heard about it, but clearly hadn’t expected something this elaborate. The packaging Jae-won had designed was more visually striking than anything currently on the market. Even to ordinary eyes, it stood out.
Thanks to that, Jae-won ended up giving a full explanation in front of Su-gyeong’s parents. That wasn’t enough—they wanted a live demonstration, so he had to open the package and show them how it worked. A small argument broke out: Su-gyeong wanted to keep the package intact, while her parents insisted the software itself was what mattered and needed to be installed. It turned out she had a bit of an otaku streak. Next time he gave her a package, he would need to prepare a display copy and a working copy separately.
After some back-and-forth, they finally opened the package and installed Keyboard Warrior 1.0. Jae-won was in a hurry. The disks he had brought weren’t just the Korean version—he also had the American version. Even on a 286 it would run, so he had brought it just in case. But Su-gyeong’s computer was a 386 DX, which meant he could test not only whether it ran, but its maximum performance as well.
Jae-won’s fingers moved faster over the keyboard. There were two executable files on the diskette: one that ran directly from the diskette, and an installer for computers with hard drives. When he launched the installer, several message boxes appeared. The interface was, of course, the Ribbon Interface.
“Oh? It’s asking for a name!”
A prompt appeared asking for the user’s name. Jae-won stepped aside and told her to do it herself. Su-gyeong typed “Ryu Su-gyeong” with painfully slow hunt-and-peck typing. It took her a full minute for three characters, yet she looked proud of herself. When she pressed Enter, a new field appeared.
“Registration number?”
“It’s on the back page of the manual.”
This was one of the anti-piracy measures Jae-won had prepared. It was a sixteen-character string of letters and numbers generated by a specific algorithm, unique to each package. He had used Lotus 1-2-3 formulas to create them, printed the results on sticker paper, and attached them to the manuals. Doing this by hand for every package had required a lot of extra labor during assembly.
After spending another two minutes entering the registration number, the program finally launched. When the ID Technology logo and the Keyboard Warrior title screen appeared, Su-gyeong’s family let out impressed gasps. Especially when they saw the “Made by” section listing Yoo Jae-won’s name and the “Special Thanks” section mentioning their school teachers, they nodded in approval.
“Practice with this every day. Once you can do long-text exercises at over five hundred characters per minute, you’ll be able to use most programs comfortably.”
He had her turn the computer on and off several times and practice launching Keyboard Warrior from the hard drive. Only after Su-gyeong could do it without looking at the instruction note did Jae-won finally bring out the American version.
“What’s that?”
“It’s for practicing English keyboard layout.”
Su-gyeong looked unimpressed. Unlike the full Korean package, this one came in three plain diskettes.
“English? You mean the alphabet? So I can study English with it?”
While Su-gyeong remained indifferent, her parents showed interest. English had always been the most popular foreign language, and that was still true in the late 1980s.
“Yes, but it’s not for learning English itself—it’s for mastering the English keyboard layout.”
He ran the installer and loaded it onto the hard drive. Everything appeared only in English, and the setup was far more complicated. Instead of a registration number, the program required hardware configuration. As operating systems became more advanced, users no longer needed to handle such settings. At most, you chose an installation folder. But that kind of convenience didn’t exist yet. DOS was a brutally simple operating system; every program had to detect and use the attached hardware on its own.
That was why Jae-won had included a function—simple though it was—to scan the computer’s performance and expansion cards. The explanation sounded impressive, but in reality it simply read the device IDs stored at each hardware address. It worked perfectly. Once executed, Su-gyeong’s computer specifications appeared on screen in full.
The CPU was an Intel 386 DX running at 33 MHz. It had 1 MB of RAM, a 40 MB hard drive, and a VGA card with 512 KB of memory. It even had a sound card—a Creative Sound Blaster 1.0, which added a PCM chip for recording and playback to the basic AdLib card that only had an FM synthesizer. The disk drives supported both 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch formats, and it even came with a rarely used three-button ball mouse. Daeho Electronics had apparently installed every top-tier option available at the time of purchase. No wonder his mother had been smiling all day after signing the contract last Tuesday.
The overall performance score came out as S-Class. That meant it could maintain a steady 60 frames per second while using sound. After confirming the specs, Jae-won started the installation. The moment it finished, he launched the program.
—I! D! Technology!
Half the screen was filled with massive I and D letters. A heavy thudding sound played as the screen shook like an earthquake. Then the word “Technology” appeared with a resonant hum. Immediately after, the words “Keyboard Warrior” materialized alongside a figure in a sleek full-body suit, and the title was stamped across the screen.
—Zombie Crush!
The letters appeared a beat later, splattered with blood. It was the new logo screen for the American version of Keyboard Warrior.
“Whoa!”
Su-gyeong’s unfiltered admiration burst out. The futuristic full-body suit looked cool enough to take on demons from hell. The twenty-first-century design was on an entirely different level from 1980s aesthetics. The only weapon given to the person who should have been holding a massive gun was a keyboard!
Jae-won had turned the American version of Keyboard Warrior into something that felt like a game. As the title suggested, the goal was to defeat hordes of zombies. But instead of shooting them like in a normal game, players typed to kill them. The character, short-word, and long-text exercises served as tutorials explaining the game’s functions, while the main game was Zombie Crush.
Jae-won had realized that no matter how hard he thought about it, a Korean typing tutor alone would never compete in the American market. He had planned to strengthen the game elements, but something like an alien invasion lacked real appeal. On 386 machines, which were common in the U.S., such games felt trivial. So he changed his approach entirely, making the game the central focus. The setting, however, carried over directly from the Korean version.
The gift from the aliens was “Spirit Speech”—the power of words amplified tens of millions of times, allowing people to communicate mind-to-mind. Those who understood the alien language could even perform miracles through the power of speech. But there was a side effect. Human words contained not only positive meanings but negative ones as well. As a result, the impure corpses that had been cursed and laid to rest began to rise again. The so-called Zombie Rush incident. When the world fell into chaos, a hero appeared—the protagonist who had awakened the power of Spirit Speech granted by the aliens. His weapon was a keyboard capable of further amplifying that power. A warrior who wielded a keyboard instead of a gun. That was why he was called the Keyboard Warrior.