Dell reflects on 25 years of PCs ~ PC arrived in 1981

CNET ^ | August 7, 2006 4:00 AM PT | By Tom Krazit Staff Writer, CNET News.com

[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.

Michael Dell

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?

"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..."

--Michael Dell

I dropped out of college because that's what I thought would happen. So, that for me was in 1984 and I started a company around that idea, believing that more and more people would know how to use PCs, that they would become easier to use, that even people could buy them without going to a store. We had a sense for it in the early '80s but certainly couldn't say we imagined it. It is just the way it happened.

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?"

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.

--Michael Dell

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.  

[Fatuncle]

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!

And his name will be Al Gore.

[GoldCountryRedneck]

IBM PCs were hideously expensive: $8000 or so....

Hmmmm...lookin' at my Fry's Electronics invoice of 11/82, my IBM 8088 with two floppy drives, 128K memory, and a COLOR monitor was $2540.

Six months later, I added a 10Mb HD/Controller card .... for $1100!!!!

Just amazing.....

~GCR~

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Nice Buy....want more SCSI discs I have two 18 G Atlas and a 36 G ......just upgraded to two 160 G Seagate SATA II drives.

[mugs99]

DELL PCs suck!

And so does their service. I'm posting from my old Compaq...My new dell is belly up again. I bought the service contract with the PC.

The new Dell arrived with defective memory. Had no success communicating with the woman in Bangalore. Finally got ahold of a Dell rep in the states. Had to threaten a lawsuit to get new memory which I had to install myself. Two days after I installed the memory the power supply died. Same service problem and same result. Three months after installing the power supply the modem quit. This time Dell told me it couldn't possibly be the modem...it was a software problem. I threw in the towel, went to Staples and bought a new modem. Problem fixed.

That was three weeks ago. Last night the monitor died, and no this is not a powerline problem. I have this Compaq in my shop, The Dell and another Compaq in the house and only the Dell has had problems.

I will never buy another Dell!
.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Another Memory thread:

The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time (long)

[Cheburashka]

I thought the first home computer was the Coleco Adam?
---
Once upon a time there were many microcomputers. They were made by various companies and had proprietary operating systems, i.e. o/s's owned by the company that made the computer. (This is where your Coleco Adam fit in.)

Then one day a company called IBM (you may have heard of them) announced that they were going to start making microcomputers, theirs would be called a PC (standing for Personal Computer). The operating system - known as DOS - was licensed from a little (at that time - they're somewhat larger now) company called Microsoft.

This PC, backed by the largest computer company in the world, caused a nuclear winter in the microcomputer industry, all the proprietary computers were exterminated, except for one - Apple Computers. Some of the other companies survived by licensing DOS from Microsoft, others stated fresh making computers using DOS - these became known as PC clones. Along the way there were many new improved models and upgrades for all these computers, PCs and clones.

Eventually IBM decided they couldn't make money making PCs, so they closed up their small computer division, and there was no pint in calling other brands PC clones, so they became known simply as PC's.

This is enough history, we haven't gotten out of the 80's. The event being celebrated is the introduction of the IBM PC twenty five years ago.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

ROFL ....at your tagline.....!!!

[IronJack]

That's the picture.

[Cheburashka]

Admiral Hopper reported the solution to her superiors just the way it went down, i.e. "We found a bug and....".

Thus the expression!
---
My understanding is that they scotch-taped the deceased moth right into the log book.

So somewhere the original computer "bug" is preserved.

[IronJack]

And his name will be Al Gore.

Not if he's telling the truth.

[Cheburashka]

I described the "bug" in post #69, but you had already posted the picture of it.

[Poser]

I have a Northstar Advantage CP/M machine with two hard-sectored floppy drives. I can still play Asteroids on it.

Oh yeah... 64K or RAM!

I think I have a Radio Shack Model II with two, 8-inch floppy drives around here as well. I'm afraid neither my Kaypro nor my Osborne survided the 90s.

[Physicist]

I nominate this Gateway model as the worst pc ever made.

I would nominate an early eMachine that my dad made the mistake of buying.

The worst TWO design flaws I ever saw were in the same machine, a Fujitsu PC I used when I was in Japan. First, the keys were so loose that if you hit them at the slightest angle away from the exact perpendicular, they'd bind and not go down. Touch typing was impossible. The worst flaw, however, was that if you slid the keyboard back until it hit the system box, it would actually press the power button and turn the machine off. Many a graduate student learned the hard way to use that keyboard only when it was on his lap.

[freedumb2003]

I love my Latitude x300 (so wonderfully tiny and tough), but my home desktops are Sony Viao's -- which have lasted for many years.

[gorush]

We had a PC's Limited 286...two speeds, 8 or 12 MHz as I recall. I have purchased many Dell drafting stations over the years (at prices that bring tears to my eyes), recent experiences with support have left me unwilling to purchase another Dell product.

[Cheburashka]

You forgot how while he was using the stone hammer to chisel the punch cards he also had to use it to fight off the velociraptors.

[PAR35]

IBM doesn't make PCs or laptops any more. They got out of the business.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

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