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. 
And I used the pronoun "he" to describe that old-timer, because in those days, the only woman in computer programming was Grace Hopper.
Fire that bad boy UP!
I've got an Apple IIc, circa 1983, but the built-in 5 1/4 floppy drive doesn't work, so it can't boot.
128K of bank-switched RAM, yo!
An article in today's Wall Street Journal recounts how Dell is getting beat by HP. IMO - Dell started losing it when they started selling extended warranties. It shifted risk from Dell to the customer; the quality department hid behind the extended warranty revenues and quality went to heck.
I'm switching to, most likely, HP and advising my friends to do the same. In my little circle of friends I'm the Alpha Geek so they ask my opinion.
BTW - I'm starting a non Microsoft project - It'll be build a PC or Laptop without any Microsoft products, then use it for more secure web access. Should be fun.
You may be right, I think they now do more with laptops than PCs.
Although we do kid in this house about all our PC's being IBM.........my husband built them all, and he works for IBM. LOL!!! But none of the parts came from IBM.
Get the latest Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop....not available in the retail stores.....the Conix Desktop is absolutely the best thing yet for serious browsing ., cutting and pasting,...will take some horsepower though,....AMD X2 3800+ drives it nicely.....
Intel servers with used IBM notebooks provide all of my computing horsepower. Little if any need to cost justify a Dell Precision 690 for my IT business. When a notebook crashes I simply throw it out like a disposable TV and buy another.
The original PC was an IBM attempt to get into the home computer market then dominated by the Apple II and a host of CP/M machines.
Rather than going through the usual IBM design process, which had already failed to design an affordable microcomputer (for example the failed IBM 5100), a special team was assembled with authorization to bypass normal company restrictions and get something to market rapidly. This project was given the code name Project Chess.
The team consisted of just twelve people headed by Don Estridge. They succeeded — development of the PC took about a year. To achieve this they first decided to build the machine with "off-the-shelf" parts from a variety of different original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and countries. Previously IBM had developed their own components. Second, they decided on an open architecture so that other manufacturers could produce and sell compatible machines — the IBM PC compatibles, so the specification of the ROM BIOS was published. IBM hoped to maintain their position in the market by royalties from licensing the BIOS, and by keeping ahead of the competition.
At the time, Don Estridge and his team considered using the 801 processor and its operating system that had been developed at the IBM research laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York (The 801 was an early RISC microprocessor designed by John Cocke and his team at Yorktown Heights.) The 801 was at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the Intel 8088, and the operating system many years more advanced than the DOS operating system from Microsoft, that were finally selected. Ruling out an in-house solution made the team’s job much easier and may have avoided a delay in the schedule, but the ultimate consequences of this decision for IBM were disastrous.
Unfortunately for IBM, other manufacturers rapidly reverse engineered the BIOS to produce their own royalty-free versions. Columbia Data Products produced the Multi Personal Computer, the first IBM-PC compatible computer. Compaq Computer Corporation announced the first portable IBM PC compatible in November 1982 (it did not ship until March 1983) — the Compaq Portable.
Once the IBM PC became a commercial success the PC came back under the usual IBM management control, with the result that competitors had little trouble taking the lead from them. (In this regard, IBM's tradition of "rationalizing" their product lines—deliberately restricting the performance of lower-priced models in order to prevent them from "cannibalizing" profits from higher-priced models—worked against them).
As of June 2006, IBM PC and XT models are still in use at the majority of U.S. National Weather Service upper-air observing sites. The computers are used to process data as it is returned from the ascending radiosonde, attached to a weather balloon. They are being phased out over a several year period, to be replaced by the Radiosonde Replacement System.
Interesting point. I am doing my dissertation on information transfer between administrative assistants and their manager; the goal is to inform knowledge management systems design. I'm familiar with this observation by the DOL.
For those admin staff who acquire the skills, they can move into a whole new realm of duties, many of which were previously done by managers. Computers enable them to do research, create and use databases, pull in info from other departments and write the reports that bosses once wrote.
From my research, although managers 'could' use a lot of the typical office technology, they often don't - they are too busy at meetings, making decisions from reports supplied by others, etc. All of my admin participants were quite adept at the technology and handed off work to their bosses pretty much complete.
This work was done in a city government, so it may differ in another type of organization. However, my participants' work covered a wide range of responsibilities, from accounting to animal management. I saw the same thing in every deptartment. I think technology will reduce the number of lower level clerical support staff, but seems to have created this sort of para-professional level of admin assistants who are tech savvy and have a very high level of responsibility w/n the organization.
I don't follow the PC wars much, but supposedly Dell's been declining in quality in the past few years. I suspect their expansion into the low-end market has hurt their geek cred.
I have a still-reliable P-100 Gateway from back when Gateway was on top, and I never quite trust my HP bought in 2002.
I am using a five-year-old Dell Laptop right now, still works great except it can't handle internet video very well.
Trivia: Admiral Hopper is generally given credit for having coined the term "bug" as in "program bug"....
Back in the "Stone Age", logic paths were tubes and electrical switches. During one of the early runs, the 'puter stopped working much to the consternation of the top scientists there.
After days of unsuccessful high-level-and-theoretics-based trouble shooting it was still dead.
While the 'brains' scratched their pointy heads, a low-level technician, by chance, discovered a dead (and fried)moth in one of the electro-latches.
The moth was cleaned up and...."Sha-Zammm!", the 'puter was back on the air!
Admiral Hopper reported the solution to her superiors just the way it went down, i.e. "We found a bug and....".
Thus the expression!
~GCR~
p.s. I still have my old 8088-based IBM PC. Purchased in 1982. And it still works! Regretfully, I don't have an original green-monochome monitor to complete the display....
I've got a picture of the incident card in one of my books. It's hilarious.
Fixed the bottom Link for followon Pages....
The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time -- PC World
***************************AN EXCERPT **********************
****************************
IBM's first PC, announced on August 12, 1981, was far from the first personal computer--but when it arrived, there was near-universal agreement that it was likely to be a landmark machine. It was. And 25 years later, it still ranks among the most significant computers ever.
Like the IBM Personal Computer, Model 5150, the greatest systems have always had ambitions to boldly go where no computer has gone before. Without these innovative machines, the PC revolution would have been a lot less...well, revolutionary. So we decided to celebrate the IBM PC's 25th birthday by identifying the 25 PCs that have mattered most--from any manufacturer, and from any era.
No single characteristic makes a computer great. But we managed to boil down an array of winning qualities into four factors, all of which happen to begin with the letter I.
Armed with this scale, we considered dozens of PCs--which meant that we also had to consider the question "What is a PC, exactly?" Ultimately we decided that a PC is anything that's recognizably a desktop or portable computer in design--or, alternatively, anything that runs an operating system originally created for desktops and laptops. After a lot of nostalgic debate, we selected our winners. Which systems we picked--and didn't pick--for our Top 25 may be controversial. If one of your favorites didn't make our roster, check out our list of 25 near-great PCs.
Just to drum up a little suspense, we'll reveal the Top 25 starting with number 25, and then work our way backward to the single greatest PC of all time. (Spoilsports can skip ahead to number 1; we won't be any the wiser. You can also jump to the complete list of our Top 25 picks.)
Ready?
Via Distrowatch/....
My first personal computer, in 1981, was a TI-99-4A, from Texas Instruments. It hooked up to the TV, and stored programs and data on cassette tapes.
FWIW during a starving artiste period I used to write for a geek hobbyist mag named The Linux Journal before it got profitably madeover by people like Doc Searles. :)
Development Release: SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 RC3
There is some effort to get the OpenGL Desktop working and it requires a Video Card that responds to Open GL 3D commands....I have a Nivida Ge 6200 Turbo I think....but I think the later models of ATI are supported also.
One was of a woman who called and could not get her computer to work, not matter what they did. Over the phone, he walked her through all the steps and then realized that she might not have it plugged in. So, to save her some dignity, he said "Is this the model with the rabbit ears?" and she said no, and he said, "Oh, well that's your problem, this model has to be plugged into the wall to work. Can you check that?" Yep, not plugged in.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.