{"id":705,"date":"2026-09-06T15:22:57","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T18:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/2026\/09\/a-historia-da-dell\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T00:34:50","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T03:34:50","slug":"a-historia-da-dell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/2026\/09\/a-historia-da-dell\/","title":{"rendered":"The history of Dell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Michael<\/p>\n

In 1984, while IBM and Apple fought for headlines, a medical freshman aged 19 was assembling PCs in his University of Texas dorm room. He discovered something the giants took decades to understand: selling directly to customers, without inventory or intermediaries, changes everything<\/strong>. This is Dell's story \u2014 from dorm room number 2713 to the biggest deal in technology history.<\/p>\n

1984: PC\u2019s Limited, US$ 1.000 in capital<\/h2>\n

Michael Dell<\/strong> started selling upgrades and custom-built PCs with US$ 1.000 in capital, under the name PC\u2019s Limited<\/strong>. In 1985 came its first own computer, the Turbo PC<\/strong> (an 8088 at 8 MHz), advertised in magazines and sold by phone \u2014 US$ 795, well below IBM. In the first year, US$ 73 million in revenue. Medical school did not survive the second semester.<\/p>\n

The direct model<\/h2>\n

Dell's secret weapon was never hardware \u2014 it was logistics<\/strong>. The direct model (build-to-order) meant: the customer configures, Dell assembles and ships, and only then pays suppliers. Negative inventory in days of parts, other people's working capital, and no margin lost to resellers. In the \u201990\u2019s it became a Harvard case study, and in 1992<\/strong> Michael Dell became the youngest Fortune 500 CEO. When the internet arrived, Dell was the first to sell PCs at scale through its website \u2014 US$ 1 million a day as early as 1997.<\/p>\n

The 2000 decade: the top and the hangover<\/h2>\n

In 2001<\/strong> Dell became the world's largest PC manufacturer, with the lines every admin knows by heart: OptiPlex<\/strong> in corporate desktops, Latitude<\/strong> in laptops, PowerEdge<\/strong> in servers \u2014 and the unforgettable \u201cDell dude\u201d on American TV. But the direct model was copied, retail mattered again, and quality slipped (the bulging-capacitor era hit OptiPlex GX270\/280 hard \u2014 anyone who replaced motherboards in batches knows). In 2004, Michael handed the baton to Kevin Rollins; in 2007<\/strong>, with HP back on top, he retook command.<\/p>\n

2013: the bet on going private<\/h2>\n

With the PC market shrinking and Wall Street impatient, Michael Dell made the boldest move of his career: in 2013<\/strong>, together with Silver Lake, he took the company private for US$ 24,9 billion<\/strong> \u2014 at the time, the biggest technology buyout in history. Away from quarterly pressure, Dell reinvented itself as a corporate infrastructure company.<\/p>\n

2016: EMC, the biggest deal in IT history<\/h2>\n

Three years later came the earthquake: the acquisition of EMC for US$ 67 billion<\/strong> \u2014 still the largest acquisition in technology history. It brought storage dominance and the crown jewel: control of VMware<\/strong>. The new Dell Technologies became a one-stop datacenter shop: servers, storage, networking, virtualization. In 2018<\/strong> the company returned to the stock market and, in 2021<\/strong>, spun off VMware (later sold to Broadcom \u2014 but that licensing headache is a topic for another post).<\/p>\n

2024\u20132026: the PC company becomes an AI supplier<\/h2>\n

The post could stop in 2021, and for a while the story seemed to have ended there: a mature infrastructure company, growing slowly. That is not what happened. Dell repositioned itself as an artificial intelligence hardware supplier, and the move came with cuts.<\/p>\n

In August 2024<\/strong> the company announced layoffs affecting 12.500 people \u2014 10% of the workforce<\/strong> \u2014 explicitly to reinvest in AI initiatives. In February 2025<\/strong> it sold Secureworks, its security division, to Britain's Sophos. In December 2025<\/strong> it bought Israel's Dataloop<\/strong>, a data infrastructure company, for US$ 120 million. Cutting on one side, buying on the other \u2014 the pattern of a company changing its core business.<\/p>\n

The two contracts showing how far it has come are from 2026. The Pentagon<\/strong> signed a deal spanning five years and US$ 9,7 billion<\/strong> for military software supply. And, in May 2026<\/strong>, OpenAI<\/strong> partnered with Dell so enterprise customers could run Codex in on-premises<\/em> and hybrid environments \u2014 in other words, the AI model leaving the cloud and returning to the customer's rack, exactly the territory where Dell has sold for thirty years.<\/p>\n

It is the same logic as always, incidentally: Dell did not build the model or accelerator. It built the box, logistics, and support contract around them.<\/p>\n

Dell and Linux<\/h2>\n

For our world, Dell deserves its own chapter. PowerEdge<\/strong> servers are among the world's most common servers running Linux, with official Ubuntu, RHEL, and SUSE support \u2014 and iDRAC, alongside HPE's iLO, defined modern remote management. On the desktop, Project Sputnik<\/strong> (2012) made the XPS 13 the benchmark for factory-installed Linux laptops: the Developer Edition<\/strong> line still comes with preinstalled, certified Ubuntu \u2014 for years, the standard answer to \u201cwhich laptop should I buy to run Linux without a fight\u201d.<\/p>\n

Managing a PowerEdge on Linux<\/h2>\n

If you have a PowerEdge in front of you, three tools solve almost everything \u2014 and all run on Linux.<\/p>\n

The iDRAC<\/strong> is the embedded management controller: a board with its own IP that powers on, shuts down, and monitors the server even when the operating system is down. It communicates through the web, SSH, and racadm<\/code>:<\/p>\n

# do seu terminal, contra o IP do iDRAC\nracadm -r 192.168.0.120 -u root -p SENHA getsysinfo\nracadm -r 192.168.0.120 -u root -p SENHA getsel        # o log de eventos do hardware\nracadm -r 192.168.0.120 -u root -p SENHA serveraction powercycle\n\n# ou por SSH, direto no controlador\nssh root@192.168.0.120\nracadm getsysinfo\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
Change iDRAC's default password.<\/strong> For many years it was calvin<\/code>, with username root<\/code>, and this appears on every default-credential list on the planet. An internet-exposed iDRAC with the factory password is physical server access handed out for free \u2014 put the interface on a management VLAN and never expose it.<\/p>\n
For inventory and health from within the system, OpenManage Server Administrator<\/strong> (OMSA) lives in Dell's Linux repository<\/a> and responds through omreport<\/code>:<\/p>\n
omreport chassis                          # vis\u00e3o geral: fonte, ventoinha, temperatura\nomreport chassis memory                   # pentes, slots e erros corrigidos\nomreport storage pdisk controller=0       # cada disco f\u00edsico do RAID\nomreport system alertlog                  # o hist\u00f3rico de alertas\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
And firmware, once the most painful part of maintaining Dell on Linux, is now the easiest: Dell publishes on LVFS<\/strong>, so fwupd<\/code> updates BIOS and components without leaving the command line, without a boot USB drive, and without Windows:<\/p>\n
sudo apt install fwupd\nfwupdmgr get-devices        # o que d\u00e1 para atualizar nesta m\u00e1quina\nfwupdmgr refresh            # baixa o cat\u00e1logo do LVFS\nfwupdmgr get-updates\nsudo fwupdmgr update\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
On laptops in the Developer Edition<\/strong> line, this works out of the box, including BIOS and fingerprint reader \u2014 exactly what Project Sputnik certification bought: not Ubuntu installed, but a commitment that firmware would also arrive through the Linux path.<\/p>\n
Timeline<\/h2>\n