Michael Dell

Michael Saul Dell (born February 23, 1965 in Houston, Texas) is the founder of Dell Inc.
He is the son of an orthodontist and grew up in a well-to-do Jewish family. He had his first encounter with a computer at the age of 15 when he broke down a brand new Apple II computer and rebuilt it, just to see if he could. Dell attended Memorial High School in Houston, Texas, where he did not excel scholastically. Reportedly one of his teachers, still currently teaching there, commented to him that he "would probably never go anywhere in life."
After graduating high school, he attended the University of Texas at Austin intending to become a physician.While at the university, he started a computer company called PC's Limited [sic] in his dormitory room.
The company became successful enough that, with the help of an additional loan from his grandparents, Dell dropped out of college at the age of 19 to run the business full-time. In 1987, PC's Limited changed its name to Dell Computer Corporation.
Accolades for Dell include: "Entrepreneur of the Year" from Inc. magazine; "Man of the Year" from PC Magazine; "Top CEO in American Business" from Worth Magazine; "CEO of the Year" from Financial World and Industry Week magazines.
In the 2005 publication of the Forbes 400, Dell was listed as the 4th richest man in the United States and the 18th richest in the world with net assets of around US$ 18 billion.

The Microsoft Man!

William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
Born on Oct. 28, 1955, Gates grew up in Seattle with his two sisters. Their father, William H. Gates II, is a Seattle attorney. Their late mother, Mary Gates, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent, and chairwoman of United Way International.
Gates attended public elementary school and the private Lakeside School. There, he discovered his interest in software and began programming computers at age 13.
In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a freshman, where he developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer - the MITS Altair.
In his junior year, Gates left Harvard to devote his energies to Microsoft, a company he had begun in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began developing software for personal computers. Gates' foresight and his vision for personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry.
Gates oversaw the invention and marketing of the MS-DOS operating system, the Windows operating interface, the Internet Explorer browser, and a multitude of other popular computer products. Along the way he gained a reputation for fierce competitiveness and aggressive business savvy.

Okay! okay! okay! lets leave the past!

Computers and technology as a whole have taken a big turn, thanks to guys like Steve Jobs
Bill Gates and the others. Now lets take a look at their acheivements.

Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, which he co-founded in 1976, and Pixar, the Academy-Award-winning animation studios which he co-founded in 1986.
Steve Jobs innovative idea of a personel computer led him into revolutionizing the computer hardware and software industry. When Jobs was twenty one, he and a friend, Wozniak, built a personel computer called the Apple. The Apple changed people's idea of a computer from a gigantic and inscrutable mass of vacuum tubes only used by big business and the government to a small box used by ordinary people. No company has done more to democratize the computer and make it user-friendly than Apple Computer Inc. Jobs software development for the Macintosh re-introduced windows interface and mouse technology which set a standard for all applications interface in software.

Mordern Computers Make History

"History of Modern Computers" finally brings us to a name most of you will have heard of. IBM stands for International Business Machines, the largest computer company in the world today. IBM is responsible for numerous inventions having to do with computers.
The company incorporated in 1911, starting as a major producer of punch card tabulating machines. In the 1930s, IBM built a series of calculators (the 600s) based on their card processing equipment. In 1944, IBM co-sponsored the Mark 1 computer (together with Harvard University), the first machine to compute long calculations automatically.

Into the digital era.

The dawn of the digital age began in World War Two with the invention of secret computers to break German codes. More generally, the war inspired huge advances in electronics on both sides of the Atlantic. By the end of the 1940s, it was clear that the future belonged to computers.
It was the telecommunications industry that had provided the bulk of the components and expertise from which the first computers were assembled.
In the end, the favour was returned because it was in telecommunications that the new computers were able to make their biggest early impacts.

The Computer Age Dawns!

Some of the boldest early steps into the computer age were taken in Britain. Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, did his main work at Cambridge University before joining the team of code-breakers at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes.

First electronic computer (1943) : The building of Colossus
By designing a huge machine now generally regarded as the world's first programmable electronic computer, the then Post Office Research Branch played a crucial but secret role in helping to win the Second World War. The purpose of Colossus was to decipher messages that came in on a German cipher machine, called the Lorenz SZ.

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