In 1989 the cost of living seemed high but the numbers (listed below as obtained from public sources) did not seem to bother me. After all, I had a good job, was engaged to be married and shared an apartment with my fiance.

Yearly Inflation Rate U.S.A. 4.83%
Year End Close DJIA 2753
Interest Rates 10.50%
Avg Cost of new house $120,000.00
Avg Income per year $27,450.00
Avg Monthly Rent $420.00
Avg Price for new car $15,3500.00
1 gallon of gas 97 cents
US Postage Stamp 25 cents

I worked at Concurrent Computer Corporation as my first job out of college. The technology people that I worked with were always investigating the newest innovation including a state-of-the-art computer system produced by DAK Industries Incorporated.

There were two individuals that I worked with that ordered a personal computer (PC) from DAK and seemed very happy with their purchase. I reviewed the technical specifications on the PC and it seemed a great purchase so I went ahead and bought one for my apartment. This was my first purchased computer and I thought it was a speed machine, after all it had 640 kilobytes of memory and a 286 processor and cost $2,048.00

kilobyte (k) - unit of digital storage information equal to 1,000 bytes. Locations in memory circuits are identified by binary numbers (number of addressable locations) and is represented by a power of 2. Therefore 1,000 bytes becomes base-2 or 1,024 bytes. Using the formula 1 k = 1,024 bytes, my first pc had 1 megabyte of memory (today the standard is 2 gigabytes).

Believe it or not, by the time I designed my first computer, I was still running the DAK PC that I purchased in 1989. I used it for a test machine until I converted to Linux and installed Red Hat Linux 6.x on it.

On the right and from our technology museum are the original parts to the computer designed in 1998.

Top Left Corner - video card

Top Right Corner - sound card

Bottom Left Corner - dial up modem card

Bottom Right Corner - network card

With a 128 megabytes of memory and 286 processor, the 1998 designed pc originally ran Windows 98 until it also was converted to Red Hat Linux 7.x (I could not install 7.x on the 1989 computer since the sofware required updated hardware and the update costs exceeded the worthiness). I was really proud of this computer as it was balanced (CPU, Disk, Memory were all proportional) and it served me very well until 2003 when I wanted to design a gaming computer to play PC games with.

Due to several client requests and my desire to build a better computer, we created a design to address CAD-CAM processing, gaming and heavy web development technology dreams (a dual processor with tons of memory and extreme internal components).

When designing this computer we elected to align the major components (CPU, Disk, Memory) with the most durable motherboard (Asus) and fit it into an extremely reliable clear case (Lian-Li). We wound up with 2 Xeon processors (32 bit), 2 gigabytes of memory and 2 internal hard disk drives. We quickly installed Red Hat Fedora Core 8 on this computer and turned it into a Samba Server

As of today, this Linux server is the key ingredient in our network handling a Fedora Core 10 laptop, 2 Windows XP Pro desktops and 2 networked all-in-one printers.