Direct from Dell

In 1979, at the age of nineteen, Michael Dell left his parent's home in Houston in a BMW he had purchased by selling newspaper subscriptions. Three personal laptops sat in the backseat. At the time, he was only a freshman at the University of Texas in Austin, but now he is the chairman and CEO of Dell Computer Corporation, a $30 billion firm that is the world's second-largest computer producer. Since its founding on a deceptively simple premise—to offer high-performance computer systems directly to the end customer—the company has seen its stock rise more than 90,000 percent, and now sells more than $35 million worth of equipment daily.