LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Michael Krasny: Chicago Tribune
built 638 days ago
After quitting his job as a car salesman in 1982, Krasny was forced to sell his own computer for cash. Reportedly, so many people responded to his sales ad listed in the Chicago Tribune that Krasny began buying computers in order to resell them, taking CDW public a decade later in 1993. According to Forbes, his first caller from 1982 is still a customer (as of 2000). [1]
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This direct marketer of computers, originally named Computer Discount Warehouse, was established in Chicago in 1983 by Michael Krasny after he found it surprisingly easy to sell his own computer. Krasny soon started to buy and sell wholesale and publish a mail-order catalog; he opened a retail showroom in Chicago in 1989. The company became CDW in 1993, when it started to sell stock to the public. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, CDW, based in suburban Vernon Hills, was exceeding $4.2 billion in annual sales and employing over 2,000 Chicago-area residents.
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Krasny then took a job with a doctor who was trying to automate nursing stations, but he left soon after the doctor changed the terms of their pending partnership. Short on cash, he decided in 1982 to sell the IBM PC he used for programming. He took out a "$3, three lines, three days" ad in the Chicago Tribune and sold the computer at a $200 profit. Realizing that there was a ripe market for PCs, he kept selling them through the paper and eventually set up shop as MPK Computers, a year later changing the name to Computer Discount Warehouse (CDW).
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