Michael Dell was born in Houston, Texas, in 1965. He showed an aptitude for business and for computers at a very early age. At the age of 12, he earned $2,000 selling stamps from his stamp collection. The following year he began investing in the stock market. By age 15 he had bought his first computer, and he took it apart and reassembled it to figure out how it worked. In high school, he began working for the Houston Post, becoming the newspaper’s top salesperson at age 17. In 1983 he began his studies at the University of Texas, but he soon found a business opportunity he could not ignore. He bought surplus computers from local computer dealers, added more memory to the computers, and sold them door-to-door and through mail order. By the end of his first year of college, he was selling $50,000 worth of computers every month. With $1,000 in 1984 Dell founded a computer store called PCs Ltd. By the end of the year, his sales had reached $6 million. He renamed the company Dell Computer Corporation in 1987. By 1999 Dell Computer Corporation had grown to employ more than 29,300 people in 33 countries.
