Michael Dell
Posted on 08/12/2006 10:06:07 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
The man who founded the world's largest PC company thinks the best is still to come after a quarter-century of the IBM PC.
Twenty-five years have passed since IBM launched its version of the personal computer. Apple Computer may have captured the attention of early computer hobbyists with its first products, but IBM's PC made the business world sit up and realize that personal computers could be much more than toys.
Michael Dell started off using PCs to create homework shortcuts, the way many young people at the time discovered the new devices. Few people, including Dell's parents, realized exactly how large the potential was for the personal computer. More than 20 years after he founded PC's Limited, he admits his parents never quite embraced his decision to leave the University of Texas at Austin to start the company that would eventually bear his name and record $56 billion in revenue during its last fiscal year.
As the PC industry looks back on 25 years of growth and success, CNET News.com spoke to Dell about his early experiences with the PC, the factors that led to its rapid acceptance among home and business users, and the future of the device. Here are excerpts from that conversation, and videos can be found on the right side of the page.
Can you start off by telling me a little bit about what your first-ever PC was?
When I was in junior high school, I started playing around with--at the time they were RadioShack PCs--so they were the first PCs that I was able to play around with.
Do you remember how much that cost or what the specifications were?
They were probably $800 or something like that, not super expensive and not very powerful either. They had cassette drives instead of hard-disk drives. It was even before the floppy disks. (I'd) largely do programming with Basic. I was kind of fascinated with the computing power and what that could do and what that would mean. It was just an enchanting device for me.
What were you doing with it? Were you playing simple games or...?
Just my math homework, playing around writing programs. (I was) just fascinated with the machine that could do so many computations so quickly. At the beginning of the genesis of the PC industry, it seemed like there was going to be a lot of excitement with the device like this, as it went into medicine and business and education and entertainment. Of course, nobody knew exactly what would happen, but it was a very exciting time.
When do you think you realized that this device was going to go from more of a niche device to something that almost everyone would have at some point?
Do you recall any specific event or anything that dawned on you in back around that time? I mean, you must have had to sell the idea of dropping out of college to your parents.
I didn't really sell them on it. They weren't really in favor of it. So I was, you know, rebellious--an 18, 19-year-old and just did what I wanted to do and all worked out OK.
It seems to have. So to ask you to speculate a little bit, one of the things that helped the rise of the PC 25 years ago was the way that IBM gave up control over certain parts of the PC to other companies, allowing Microsoft to license the operating system. Can you sense what the world might be like if that hadn't happened, if IBM had maintained very tight control of that device?
Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I mean, that was clearly a big factor because what it developed was an ecosystem which became and is still today incredibly important in the evolution of computing, not only in the personal computer sense, but even in the enterprise. Before that time you actually had all sorts of proprietary or semi-proprietary PCs, and the cry out from the community of users was, "Hey, how do we get a standard so that we can develop applications one time and they work on any kind of device?"
I think you could argue that the market would have been much smaller, would have developed much more slowly. Parts would have been much more expensive and computing would have never had the impact that it's had now. You could also say that if IBM and Microsoft hadn't done that, somebody else would have come along and did it, so I would believe that as well.
That original PC in 1981 was certainly a pivotal moment because it caused this ecosystem to start to flourish and allowed all sorts of companies to participate, whether they were developing add-in cards or software applications or chipsets or extending the architecture in new ways and bringing products to market that provided value, provided an alternative.
What kind of changes do you see in store for the PC over the next 20 to 25 years? Are we going to see something radically different or an evolution of the thing that we now know?
I remember about 10 years ago somebody said we were in a post-PC era. I said, "That's kind of interesting. Well, tell me about the post-PC era--what does that all mean?"
It turns out, the unit volumes for PCs have continued to grow, so now this year roughly 240 million PCs are sold all over the world. What you are going to see is that there are all sorts of new devices, but the PC has had an amazing ability to adapt and evolve and it's not really just one PC. You have all these different shapes and forms and sizes and workstations and portables, big ones and small ones and multiple processors and single processors and handheld machines and all sorts of varieties.
The physics that underlie the hardware are not slowing down at all, so the rate of improvement there is tremendous. I think there are still enormous opportunities in the user interface to make it an easier or simpler device.
I still believe the industry is in its early innings in terms of its development and (rate of) change, and certainly the pervasiveness of very high-speed broadband connections, fiber, very high-speed wireless, which will change where and how computing occurs around the world. But the PC is an indispensable part of how productivity and entertainment, education, medicine works today in society.
When you look back now and you see how far the PC has come, can you pick a couple of things that you think were instrumental in getting that device to where it is today?
I think you have a foundational element, which is the semiconductor revolution, which provided enormous improvements in power and integration and scale in being able to combine large numbers of transistors together into increasingly smaller and less-expensive packages, so that the functionality was improving at a very, very rapid rate, across all aspects of the system, whether it was processor performance or graphics performance or IO performance, network, bandwidth, all those things. That's the foundational element that's been absolutely critical.
Then, you have this ecosystem effect, which was kicked off by the famous IBM decision with Intel and Microsoft. So you have this ecosystem of literally tens of thousands of companies that are participating and billions of users. Dell has sold over 200 million PCs worldwide and this year over 40 million of them, so that ecosystem of users and companies contributing makes it much more powerful than what any single company could do themselves.
We certainly, I think, helped make PCs more affordable, (have) driven the technology transitions and reduced the time period from when technology was introduced to when it's actually available. We made the whole supply chain in the industry much more efficient; that drives efficiency, drives costs down and certainly that makes the market much larger.
The one other thing I want to ask you is what you currently use, right now at home, as your home PC.
I am using a Dell Precision 690, which is our high-end workstation. It's a two-socket system and it's got two dual-core Woodcrest (Xeon 5100 processors) in there. It's got a port with 64 (gigabytes) of memory, but I have only got 32 (gigabytes) in there.
Come on.
And I have got two of our 30-inch monitors, so it's 8.2 million pixels of resolution, which is kind of nice. And I have managed to get a fiber connection to my house, so I kind of dig into that speed on the Internet. 
LOL... a war-game chum of mine had one of those. Remember him inviting me over to play 'Midway' on it. God almighty... how far we've come!
It is amazing isn't it!
Thanks for posting.........good read!
DELL PCs suck!
I remember we had a celestial navigation mini-computer that used cassettes in the mid '80s. What a nightmare it was to use that. The whole thing was so temperamental most of us could punch the numbers on paper faster than using the computer.
But I seriously think it was the Apple II that launched the personal computing revolution. There were so many of those things in schools and libraries that when kids thought "computer," they thought "Apple."
I still admire Jobs and Wozniak for their vision, which put computers on desks years before Michael Dell or IBM.
Several hundred million people don't agree with you.
I guess we don't have to ask him how he heats his home.
There was an editorial about this milestone in one of the daily rags I read. The final sentence of it pretty much says it all:
I own a Dimension 8400, top of the line when purchased. Hasn't worked correctly from day one. Burners don't work, sound card won't see the CD or DVD player, can't burn CD or DVD. DELL support is useless.
I thought the first home computer was the Coleco Adam?
I has a "Trash 80" when I was in college. Had a modem setup to the schools' DEC10. That was hilarious trying to communicate. The phone modem was one of the "cradle" type!
The IBM Instrument Division had a machine that had more Compute power and was designed for a niche market....have forgotten the number....
Believe it or not I still have one, along with the tapes and instruction books.
PCs really cost IBM its total control of the computer industry. Very few people I know use an IBM PC.
[Hey, I think I might have found the source of Stepford Rep Nancy Peolsi's problem!]
Anyway, these computer nostalgia threads always bring out some interesting stories. Before it's over and done with, some old-timer will tell us about how he had to shovel coal for his first computer, and how it ran on punch cards made of granite.
Amusingly enough, he'll be telling the truth!
Hey Hazcat,
Have you tried swapping out harddrives/parts? I used to have a POS Gateway that gave me problems like that. Never worked right from day one. Also try to scour the internet see if other peeps have the same issues as you.
A week after the warranty went out on my Gateway, the harddrive crapped out.
I asked them why won't they honor the warranty since this has been a documented issue from day one and the harddrive which has been defective from day one finally crapped out.
Gateway told me to screwmyself ( believe it or not, the tech guy told me i was screwed) and hung up on me with his evil laugh.
I've been using Dells ever since, and I got the Complete PC care, they will have to my house quick and fix it. I am going to go and renew my contract now that you reminded me of it!
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