9/20/2023 0 Comments Dude youre getting a dell![]() In January of 1984, he moved the operation to a condo off campus. ![]() I mean, the PCs don't own the Limited, right? Ugh. The company's name was officially "PC's Limited" but that apostrophe drives me nuts, so I will be referring to it as PCs Limited. Instead, the business was officially legally founded… and Michael Dell simply neglected to inform his parents. That didn’t work out quite the way they hoped. Around Thanksgiving of 1983, they pressured him to commit to quitting the business and focus on his studies. In his college dorm room 2713 in the Dobie Center residential building, he launched a small computer business, PCs Limited, with nothing but $1000 and a rather simple product idea. As we saw when he was young, he was simply drawn to business. Unfortunately while he had every intention of going to school, he wasn’t really the school type of guy. As a good son, Dell endeavored to oblige his parents and enrolled at the University of Texas in 1983. They wanted their son to be a successful medical doctor and they exerted pressure upon him to become so. Michael Dell’s parents were successful professionals, one in orthodontia and the other in finance. With these funds, he did what I believe every young man (and perhaps more than a few grown men) in America would do, he bought himself a new computer and a new car. As a result of his efforts, Dell earned himself $18,000 dollars (roughly $66000 in 2023). Armed with the newly weds’ addresses, he then sent them a direct mail offer for a free trial subscription to the paper. They captured the addresses of all of the people who applied for marriage licenses from the courts. Dell hired all of his friends and they went to 16 counties in the Houston area. Of particular interest to a person selling newspaper subscriptions is the address to which the couple wants the license sent once it’s issued. In the USA, to be wed requires that the couple obtain and file a marriage license, and this is public information. He realized that the people who were buying the newspaper generally had one of two things in common, they were either moving to a new home or getting married. There’s obvious sales experience involved there, but the young Michael Dell wasn’t content to be just another seller of newspapers. Other critical skills for his future were gained through selling newspaper subscriptions. You could design your own circuits and you could modify them, and you could literally see exactly how the thing was working. In his own words:Ī good thing about the early personal computers is that they had completely kind of standardized chips, and so you could literally get a book about each chip and read what each pin did, and how signals were processed through the chip. Getting the machine home, he promptly chose to take it apart and see what made it work. The trajectory of Dell’s life began to take shape at the age of 15 when he bought himself an Apple ][. While he didn’t succeed, he did get part time jobs in his early teens, and he began stock and precious metal investing. At the age of 8, he tried to get out of school by taking the Highschool equivalency exam. Although he's down to slinging drinks, Ben's taking it in stride, saying "There were times when I made boatloads of money as an actor, but here I can be myself." That doesn't mean he's given up the dream just yet: he's hoping to score big with his band, Whale, which he says has "the green light," but has "decided to take a little time off to record our EP and package ourselves properly." Hm, seems like a perfect opportunity to get back together with Dell, actually - it could use some new music after getting caught using GarageBand's built-in loops in that XPS One teaser.Michael Saul Dell was born on the 23rd of February in 1965 in Houston, Texas. Although the Steven ads were hugely popular and generated tons of buzz (and revenue) for Dell, the company eventually dropped the campaign after Ben got arrested for buying pot in 2003 - shocking no one who actually watched the commercials, but apparently not the message Dell wanted to send the parents fronting the cash for all those machines. Oh, how the mighty have fallen: Ben Curtis, famous just a few years ago as "Steven the Dell Dude," is now a waiter / bartender at Tortilla Flats in New York.
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