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While a student at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984, Michael Dell founded the company as PC's Limited with capital of $1000. Operating from Michael Dell's off-campus dorm room at Dobie Center, the startup aimed to sell IBM-compatible computers built from stock components. Michael Dell started trading in the belief that by selling personal computer systems directly to customers, PC's Limited could better understand customers' needs and provide the most effective computing solutions to meet those needs. Michael Dell dropped out of school in order to focus full-time on his fledgling business, after getting about $300,000 in expansion capital from his family.
In 1985, the company produced the first computer of its own design (the "Turbo PC"), which contained an Intel 8088-compatible processor running at a speed of 8 MHz. PC's Limited advertised the systems in national computer magazines for sale directly to consumers, and custom-assembled each ordered unit according to a selection of options. This offered buyers prices lower than those of retail brands, but with greater convenience than assembling the components themselves. Although not the first company to use this model, PC's Limited became one of the first to succeed with it. The company grossed more than $73 million in its first year.
Dell, Inc. appears to have re-focused on reduced costs rather than on innovation, in line with the company's history of delivering units at the lowest cost possible via its direct-sales model. In an interview with Business Week, Mr. Dell stated "this is a company which can execute quite a bit better on things it already knows how to do.
HISTORY OF COMPUTERS - continued (PREV) (PAGE 1)
Following in the footsteps of Babbage, although unaware of his earlier work, was Percy Ludgate, an accountant from Dublin, Ireland. He independently designed a programmable mechanical computer, which he described in a work that was published in 1909.
Leslie Comrie's articles on punched card methods and W.J. Eckert's publication of Punched Card Methods in Scientific Computation in 1940, described techniques which were sufficiently advanced to solve differential equations, perform multiplication and division using floating point representations, all on punched cards and unit record machines. The Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau, Columbia University performed astronomical calculations representing the state of the art in computing.
Punched cards are still used and manufactured to this day, and their distinctive dimensions (and 80-column capacity) can still be recognized in forms, records, and programs around the world.
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