Teen Michael Dell recalls a 1980 encounter with a young Steve Jobs
In his memoir, Michael Dell describes watching a 25-year-old Steve Jobs speak at a 1980 Houston user-group meeting, an experience that foreshadowed their later rivalry and brief friendship.
Michael Dell’s new memoir revisits a 1980 Houston user-group session where a 25-year-old Steve Jobs addressed attendees, likening personal computers to a fleet of Volkswagens that could take anyone anywhere. At the time, Dell was a fifteen-year-old tech enthusiast who had just dismantled an Apple II and was already earning money selling newspaper subscriptions. The book notes that five years later the two became industry rivals: Jobs tried to sell Dell the NeXT operating system in 1993, and in 1997 Apple demonstrated a Dell PC running Mac OS on Intel, but negotiations collapsed over royalty demands.
That same year, Jobs sent Dell a terse email about class, then used Dell’s image in a keynote to signal Apple’s competitive intent. Dell now looks back on those moments as a formative glimpse of the computer revolution and the complex relationship between the two innovators.
Why it matters
The story shows how early personal-computer pioneers first met and later shaped the tech industry’s competitive dynamics.
In this story
