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.'"

Comments

If she's like MY mom...

[Bandman]

"...but think about what could have happened if you'd have stayed in school"

Re:hmmm, some generic info about CEO Dell's home P

[laffer1]

Even he knows the lowend dimensions and optiplex are crap.

Business, Not Computer, Skills

[truthsearch]

His skill was in streamlining a business model. AFAIK he hasn't done anything directly to improve computers. He helped lower the cost to consumers. He deserves a lot of business credit, but I'm not sure he deserves any geek cred. He's already been written up in BusinessWeek. I don't think he warrants a /. article.

Re:hmmm, some generic info about CEO Dell's home P

[Rude Turnip]

My only response is this...we flew to the Moon and back using a computer with 32kb of RAM. Have you *at least* done that with your system?

Re:hmmm, some generic info about CEO Dell's home P

[vertinox]

I don't even have an opinion as to the goodness or not about the utilization... don't necessarily care people aren't using more than 5% of their machine -- but it's more a reflection of the effectiveness of the marketing of computers than their necessity and usefulness. Owning a machine like Dell's doesn't suggest a need.

Two things.

First, people like to overcompensate for things they could never use but for status. Why buy a car that can go 150mph when its illegal and unfeasible to drive it at that speed?

Secondly, computers age quite fast. If you buy a computer, it is reasonable to overcompensate because in 2-3 years an average computer will be out of date and underpowered. The top of the line computer today will be the below average in 5 years but you still can get some life out of it.

Remember 640K ought to be enough for anyone.

Re:Express Service Code

[d3am0n]

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.

I remember early PCs in high school...

[Anonymous Freak]

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.