DELL CORPORATION
Dell was born in West Houston and applied for a high school equivalency diploma at age eight. He ran a mail order stamp-trading business at age thirteen and sold subscriptions to the Houston Post by telephone at sixteen. Within a year he was named salesman of the month and was earning $18,000 annually for a direct-mail campaign he had devised that targeted newlyweds. He turned to electronics in his late teens, when he began building customized personal computers by purchasing and assembling computer components from various manufacturers. …
