In 1984, Michael Dell (Michael Dell) registered a company called Dell Computer Corporation, which began operating under the brand name PC’s Limited. Its history for the next four decades mirrored the history of the personal computer world.

For the PC industry, 1984 appeared to be a turbulent year as young talents driven by grandiose ideas made loud statements. That year, 28-year-old Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs) introduced the iconic Apple Macintosh at the US Super Bowl in a commercial shot by Ridley Scott. This was a heavy blow to IBM, which introduced the first personal computer with an Intel processor three years ago. At the same time, 28-year-old Bill Gates (Bill Gates) led the development of MS-DOS, an operating system that would run on IBM PC clones; A year ago Microsoft released Windows 1.0.

All of these young talents looked old compared to 19-year-old Michael Dell, a freshman at the University of Texas. He started a small business in early 1984, purchasing $1,000 worth of computer components and began accepting orders for upgrades to IBM computers. By the end of the year, the company was producing custom computers that could rival IBM PCs but cost half the cost. As Dell later wrote, in the first months the company’s staff consisted of: “Three men with screwdrivers sitting at 1.83m tables raising machines”. Within a year, the company moved to 2.8 thousand square meters and annual sales reached 60 million dollars. Four years later, on June 22, 1988, the company abandoned the PC’s Limited brand and went public at market value. 85 million dollars In 2000, Dell’s capitalization reached 100 billion dollars, but the bursting dot-com bubble revived the industry.

The secret to Dell’s success was its business model: PCs assembled to order were sold directly to consumers and businesses without the need to keep inventory. Today the dominance of this PC model over Intel processors is something we take for granted, but in 1984 it was not so obvious. At the time, there were many alternatives to the Apple Macintosh, Radio Shack TRS-80, or Commodore Amiga. However, with popular programs such as Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, as well as hardware architecture allowing for easy configuration upgrades, the market for IBM-compatible computers began to grow rapidly. Dell was at the top of the list of alternatives to IBM from the beginning and was quickly approaching the lead. An additional incentive was the release of Windows 3.1 in 1992, followed by Windows 95 in 1995.

During the first 15 years, Dell’s business grew at an incredible pace. The company opened a factory in Limerick, Ireland, in 1990 to serve orders from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and entered the Asian market in 1995. In 1992, just four years after going public, the company made the Fortune 500 list. From 1996 to 2000, Dell’s daily sales rose from $1 million to $40 million, and its stock price nearly doubled each year. By 2000, the company had become the largest computer manufacturer in the United States and second only to Compaq worldwide.

In addition to their fabulous wealth, what Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell had in common was that they dropped out of college to start businesses. In the eighties, Gates and Dell were at the head of their rapidly growing companies, and in 1983 Jobs appointed John Sculley (John Sculley) from PepsiCo to head Apple. Two years later, Scully fired Jobs and Apple rose to the top; A few years later, the company’s board fired Scully, who earned the title of one of the worst CEOs in history, according to CEO Magazine. In 1997, when Apple failed as a public company, Dell was asked what he would do as Apple’s CEO. “I would close it down and distribute the money to shareholders.”, – answered Dell then. In an interview in 2011, he stated that his answer was misinterpreted. Today, Apple’s market cap is more than 30 times that of Dell.

In the nineties, Dell had many serious competitors in the field of direct sales of computers. The largest of these was Gateway 2000 (then just Gateway) – which made profits of more than $1 billion on revenues of $6.3 billion in 1997 and rejected Compaq’s $7 billion takeover offer. The brand had already been purchased by Acer for 700 million dollars. Hewlett-Packard and Compaq were also fierce rivals. The latter introduced a portable clone of the IBM PC in 1983 and was considered a leading PC manufacturer in terms of advanced solutions. In 2002, Compaq was acquired by HP.

“Zeroes” proved to be difficult for Dell. In 2004, Michael Dell stepped down as CEO and handed over the reins of management to Kevin Rollins; he was a manager, not a technical expert. During his short tenure, Dell ceded leadership to HP and came under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). “accounting violations”. The number of complaints from customers increased and the company’s reputation was seriously damaged; The quality of service dropped sharply. In December 2007, Rollins resigned and Michael Dell returned to the CEO position.

With Dell’s comeback, the company moved into third place on the list of global computer manufacturers, behind Lenovo, which acquired the related businesses of IBM and HP in 2005. Over the next five years, the company got serious about developing its corporate side, adopting Perot Services and renaming it Dell Services. It continued to acquire many companies in the fields of data storage, system management, cloud computing, data protection and software development. In 2013, the PC market fell sharply and Michael Dell bought Dell for $24.4 billion, taking the company private again. This allowed him to move away from quarterly work and move on to long-term projects. Dell acquired storage systems manufacturer EMC for $67 billion in 2016. In 2018, the company, renamed Dell Technologies, returned to the stock market and reached a market capitalization of $21.7 billion; Its shares have risen 500% since then.

Dell Technologies reported in its latest annual report that it has 133,000 employees worldwide. More than 21% of $101 billion in revenue came from services, with another $9.3 billion for the company in the form of special dividends from Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Today, Dell continues to produce personal computers and peripherals: desktops, laptops, workstations, monitors and docking stations; Half of its sales come from outside the United States. The company sells servers, storage systems and networking equipment to help enterprise customers run and manage cloud environments, machine learning, artificial intelligence and data analytics. The company continues to sell VMware services and continues to own Secureworks, a leading global cybersecurity services provider. And it all started with a $1,000 investment.