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> And you won’t get to brag that you own a computer from Iowa. South Dakota. Gateway was HQ’d in North Sioux City, SD. There is also a South Sioux City, NE, though to my knowledge no computer manufacturers have had a presence there. My dad worked at Gateway in the mid-late ‘90s and early ‘00s. Employee perks were pretty decent for the time; for example, he could borrow a laptop to play with and learn on at home — we…
Super nice
> And you won’t get to brag that you own a computer from Iowa. South Dakota. Gateway was HQ’d in North Sioux City, SD. There is also a South Sioux City, NE, though to my knowledge no computer manufacturers have had a presence there. My dad worked at Gateway in the mid-late ‘90s and early ‘00s. Employee perks were pretty decent for the time; for example, he could borrow a laptop to play with and learn on at home — we…
Let’s be clear: they were Lego-ing together parts from China. There were no mass produced PC components in the US by the 90s.
Calling the Gateway 2000 customer support 800 number was my introduction to understanding computers and I am grateful to their staff for being patient with a 12 year old.
We got rid of it in the early aughts, but I kept the CPU all these years. Recently I found a similar Gateway slimline desktop (badged a 486DX2-66MHz) and have been using Claude to port things to DOS on it, like Cave Story [2][3]. The original 50MHz CPU still works.
1. https://books.google.com/books?id=L2RD68Gg2sMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...
Poor choice of title.
We used to emphasize that you could buy a computer with us and go home with it today, whereas down the hall, you could buy it but it would come in the mail later. Their store had demos and the big cow-patterned boxes around, but no inventory.
Also around then, I applied for and got a Gateway-branded, Holstein-patterned credit card, which I promptly maxed out to buy my own first modern computer, a P2 build not from Gateway, but from Midwest Micro. I learned Red Hat Linux on it, reading the manual on break at work even before the computer came, and it began my real career.
So lots of adjacency to Gateway, but no real firsthand experience. They were definitely a force.
Every month, when I got my BYTE magazine in the mail, the first thing I would do was to find the Gateway 2000 ad, admire the cheezy graphics and copy, and then devour every detail of the specs of their high-end machine, tracking the increase in power and decrease in price. I bought several of their machines over the years.
Then again, it's not like they're 3dfx-level good:
The hippie copy mentioned was the ad my dad bought our first PC from. He was coming back from a business trip and asked the company computer guy to help him choose one for our family. We ended up with the 486DX2-50MHz "Integrated VESA System" [1]. Calling the Gateway 2000 customer support 800 number was my introduction to understanding computers and I am grateful to their staff for being patient with a 12 year old. W…
> And you won’t get to brag that you own a computer from Iowa. South Dakota. Gateway was HQ’d in North Sioux City, SD. There is also a South Sioux City, NE, though to my knowledge no computer manufacturers have had a presence there. My dad worked at Gateway in the mid-late ‘90s and early ‘00s. Employee perks were pretty decent for the time; for example, he could borrow a laptop to play with and learn on at home — we…
Let’s be clear: they were Lego-ing together parts from China. There were no mass produced PC components in the US by the 90s.
Their business model for the UK was the same tax scam as Apple, Dell and others. Everything was mail order, operating out of Dublin.
Their products had quality multimedia toys (CD, speakers, decent screen, keyboard with extra programmable keys) combined with decent CPU/RAM/ROM/graphics for the price.
I did support for a small company that bought Gateway (in the UK) and there certainly were no 'Made in USA' labels anywhere.
I really liked their machines and I bought one myself because it had that Trinitron screen at a bargain price. I was very happy with that machine. In the UK they went a bit sour after dropping the '2000' branding with the cow spots.
Their laptops were not as successful as their desktop machines, where they never quite managed to compete in either the 'value for money' or 'nice to have' sectors. Dell, Toshiba and even Compaq had preferable laptops.
Their success in the UK was the Dell model (Ireland tax fiddle), except they didn't make you wait weeks for your machine (like Dell did, with it having to be 'built to order').