The Digital Century

Mail-Order Pride

Mention a dormitory and most people think of rooms littered with books, bottle caps, and pizza cartons. But if you visited Michael Dell's dorm room in 1983, you'd have found CPUs and floppy drives. While Dell's classmates were cramming for midterms, he was cramming circuit cards into motherboards and selling PCs via mail order. Before completing his first year at the University of Texas in Austin, the erstwhile premed student had abandoned school and founded PCs Limited, precursor to Dell Computer.

Michael Dell's days as a dorm-room tycoon are part of computer industry lore. But his real innovation was the direct-sales model. By cutting out the retailer, he revolutionized the way PCs were sold. "They're not just the company that made the box, they're the people that sold it to you," says Roger Kay, research manager for International Data Corporation in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Now with $18 billion in revenue, Dell is a long way from UT's Dobie Center dormitory. But his namesake company continues to lead the way in direct computer sales, most recently by pioneering direct sales over the Internet. Not bad for a college dropout.

--Daniel Tynan