Michael Dell goes back in time
Eponymous founder rolls back the years on social media, tweeting image of Dell's website from 1996 and old marketing campaign material
Despite being worth a reported $24bn, Michael Dell clearly hasn't forgotten his roots.
Taking to Twitter and LinkedIn, the tech leader delved down to the bottom of the archives to unearth a 20-year-old image of Dell's homepage (pictured below) from 1996.
Captioned with "We've come a long way", the screenshot shows a primitive version of the Dell website, encouraging potential customers to "build your own computer" online, along with a "buy a Dell" logo that looks suspiciously similar to that of Top of the Pops.
With Dell still infamously a direct company at this stage, the website featured an implicit swipe at the channel, claiming:
"At Dell.com, we'll help you find the right system, configure it, price it and order it, backed up by the best support and service in the business. That's what you get when the company that sells you your computer is also the company that builds it"
Dell's product portfolio was far more limited at this stage, with the website offering Dimension Desktops, Optiplex Desktops, Latitude Notebooks, Poweredge Services and ‘Dellware' software and hardware.
The page also nodded to Microsoft, featuring logos for Microsoft BackOffice - a software package aimed at small businesses that Dell used to run its website - and Internet Explorer.
As well as the old Dell homepage, Michael Dell unearthed an old image of himself imitating Uncle Sam on a poster advertising his ‘know the net' campaign.
The image (below) was tweeted to current T-Mobile CEO John Legere, who worked at Dell in the late nineties and early two-thousands.
If Michael Dell has not satisfied your nostalgia, Web Design Museum has dozens of screenshots of old homepages belonging to then-blossoming tech companies that are now among the most influential firms in the world. We've picked out a handful of our favourites.
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Michael Dell goes back in time
Eponymous founder rolls back the years on social media, tweeting image of Dell's website from 1996 and old marketing campaign material
This is Apple's homepage from 14 July 1997, just after Steve Jobs returned following Apple's acquisition of his NeXT company.
The homepage advertises Apple's disastrous Newton handheld devices - specifically the eMate - as well as Mac OS 8 which was released eight days after this screenshot and succeed by OS 9 two years later.
If anything, the Google homepage has barely changed in 20 years. Aside from this 1998 screenshot being a beta version of the search engine, everything is very much the same. Google the company, however, is far more than a mere search engine 20 years on.
Article continues on next page
Michael Dell goes back in time
Eponymous founder rolls back the years on social media, tweeting image of Dell's website from 1996 and old marketing campaign material
With the year 2000 considered to be the peak of the Dot-Com bubble, Microsoft placed its "build an online business" guide at the heart of its homepage, surrounded by adverts for its 2000 range of software products.
Microsoft's portfolio was far less expansive then than it is now, with the current homepage putting the likes of its Surface products, Xbox console and mixed reality at the forefront. Windows meanwhile is confined to a slot lower down.
Intel's homepage from 1996 looks very much like the aftermath of an explosion in a clipart factory, with a dog delivering a newspaper arguably the highlight. The page does very little to advertise what intel actually does, but does offer some "cool PC software" and "corporate stuff".