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Dell Reflects on 25 Years of PCs
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Dell, founder of the world's largest computer company, took a few minutes with CNet News.com to reflect on the past 25 years and offer a few personal notes. While Dell certainly has an impressive business history, he still thinks the best is yet to come. From the article: '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.'"
guessing not a single web app is served out of his compouter, from IIS and .NET technology (one of the main reasons for having PRO)
Actually, I assume the main reason he would choose Pro is because it lets you join domains. Home doesn't have that ability.
Actually I work at Dell doing technical support. In fact I'm typing this from work right now while I'm between calls. What happened that made your experience so bad? I've only been here about 2 months but they've been hammering customer satisfaction into us like it was a cure for cancer. I guess they got t3h shitz from other outsource sites where basically working conditions sucked and nobody cared. However i work directly for Dell itself and I'm tellin you, we'll stay on the phone for like 3 hours if that's what it takes. All of my co-workers here are pretty hardcore geeks and techies since the area our site is located in had an economic downturn in the tech industry so the majority of us have programming diploma's and electronic engineering degree's.
Discovering the joy that was a 'plotter', that produced nice smooth output, rather than the pixelated crap that came out of dot matrix printers. Found an HP letter-size plotter used really cheap, and bought it. Started printing out my homework on that, rather than on the dot matrix. The handwriting-style font that was included with Windows 3.0 worked very well for this. Plotting out my homework on notebook paper, with a blue pen, the teacher just thought I had perfect handwriting. :-D (Although, it did take about half an hour to plot out a single page....)
My high school also had early internet access, thanks to a donation of a 'mini-supercomputer' from a local supercomputer company (Sequent,) and dial-up access provided by a local college during my senior year. This computer had a whopping 32 386 processors, (which makes it marginally slower than my current cell phone,) and our connection used a quad-linked 9600 baud (effective ~38kbps) SLIP connection. It even ran X. Too bad the web browser wasn't invented until after I graduated... I had to wait another two years before the internet became 'public', and a friend and I convinced the local ISP to install SLIP software so we could try out this 'Mosaic' thingy... (On OS/2 of course. We wouldn't be caught dead running Windows.)
Then there was when (this same) friend would spend every night dialed up at 14.4kbps to a BBS in Finland so he could download install disks for this 'Linux' thing... One disk a night. Man, he had a big phone bill that month.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.