How did you become interested in technology?
We lived in Houston, and NASA and Johnson Space Center were not far away. My parents would take us there and we would see the rocket launch, and that was super exciting. Then, when I was about 8 years old, I got an electronic calculator, which in 1973 was a big problem. It was a National Semiconductor calculator. I was surprised that this could do math: multiplication and division. When I went to high school, I wasn’t on the track team or the soccer team or the basketball team. I was in the number sense club. Multiply three numbers by three numbers in your head and compete at the district level, the state level.
After school, I would go to RadioShack and go out. I would stay there until they kicked me out because I wasn’t buying anything. So Apple comes out with the Apple II, and I heard about Stephen Wozniak and Steve Jobs and I said, “I have to have one of these things.” He had saved some money from the first business things: exchanging baseball cards and stamps, trading gold and silver, investing in stocks when he was very young. I bought an Apple II and immediately took it apart, which totally surprised my parents.
How did you start Dell?
Fast forward to 1981, I’m 16, and IBM comes out with the IBM PC. “Well, this IBM PC is going to be a really big problem.” I got one of those, took it apart, and started updating and training other kids. I go to university, I go away and I keep improving the computer. And it becomes a bigger business while I’m in my first year at university. My parents found out, they were very angry with me and they said: “You must stop doing it. You are supposed to go to college.
My parents were the first of their generation to go to college, and the idea that I would leave an education to play on computers, they couldn’t understand that at all. They begged me. It was a very emotionally charged situation. So I stopped for about 10 days, and it was in those 10 days that I really decided that this was not a hobby. It was actually what he wanted to do. So I did what any 18-year-old would do: I just did it and didn’t tell my parents. I moved from my bedroom to a small office, which we got over in 30 days. And here we are.
Didn’t you graduate from college?
America, what country.
How did you go from essentially upgrading machines to discovering, “Oh, there is a market to design and build new machines.”
When I took the IBM PC apart, one of the surprising things was that neither part was from IBM. They sold it for $ 3,000 but it had, from what I could see, maybe $ 500 in parts. It seemed a bit like a criminal enterprise. I mean, in terms of mathematics.
I started updating the computers, and I would also buy the dismantled IBM computers and update them to sell. The company quickly began manufacturing these hard drive kits to upgrade IBM computers that did not have hard drives because early versions did not. We make hundreds and thousands of these kits and sell them everywhere.
