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 used this almost entirely to play games, since we had a hand-me-down 486 at the time. They would also give you a PC in agreement for continued employment for N years. We got a Pentium III 550 MHz screamer of a system, which was absolutely bonkers for my young self.
https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/gateway-2000-p...
Do you mean that in exchange for accepting a PC, he had to agree to a multiple-year enforced contract? Is the right to leave a company even a right that one can sign away in the US? Would people really do that for a few thousand dollars? That seems shockingly close to indentured servitude... "we'll pay two months of your rent up front, but you can't quit for five years no matter what we do to you."
These agreements work like signing bonuses. The compensation is given up front, but if you leave before N months then you need to return the compensation or some times a pro-rated version of it.
1. It's actually a loan.
2. If you leave or are terminated at any point for the period, you have to pay back the ENTIRE loan amount.
3. Because it's a loan, if you -do- survive employment through the term, guess what, you now have to pay tax on the 'forgiven loan'.
4. If you don't take it, you don't get hired.
I personally know some lower income people who have been negatively impacted by the people promise.
I've never worked there, I've only had the pleasure of knowing some former employees that were way happier at RKT, and the observation that the most toxic manager I have ever worked under [0] apparently had a pretty good run there after he got booted from our org [1]. What was more striking was, I had a very short stint at an org that tried to 'Emulate' their management style and it was the fastest I ever left a job.
[0] - The kind of guy who's previous wives both left him so hard they didn't even try for custody, so he was having a 'thing' with a different department's manager while her husband was dying of cancer. The creepiest moment was when she brought her kid to the office and the <10 year old kid was dressed up in the same outfit as this 40-50 something dude.
[1] - He eventually got too bold and turned on his 'lieutenant' (who also for a time would dress just like him). Once that dev lead finished the HR 'Training' that they were subjected to, he stopped the behavior of preventing the dev groups from communicating with each other. That cross communication led to a bit of a quiet internal revolt across the whole Dev org.
> Because it's a loan, if you -do- survive employment through the term, guess what, you now have to pay tax on the 'forgiven loan'.
Did you have a point to make here? Do you think you don't have to pay income taxes on bonuses?
"Education incentives" at companies can be similar.
For instance, maybe they pay for your trip to AWS Re:Invent and a couple of cert fees ($X,000.00) with the agreement you stay for a year or two. As long as you stay for the year or two, you don't own them any money. If you leave before then, they send you a prorated bill or take it out of your last paycheck.
The idea is that companies don't want to train you on their dime for you to use that training to immediately take a new job somewhere else (or worse, a competitor).
Sioux City is near a tripoint where Iowa, South Dakota, and Nebraska located in the Missouri River floodplain so it is natural they would have operations in two states at some point in its history. I just drove through here and spent a weekend in the area, Ponca State Park (NE) is lovely!
I moved to Nebraska (just outside Ponca, actually) in 1996, so I missed that part of their history. Moved away in 2004.
Agreed that Ponca State Park is delightful. I spent many a summer day there as a kid.
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').
I think to this day Monster Cable (ugh) still operates a similar scam, where the US company licenses all their cable technology (also ugh) from Monster Cable Bermuda, which exists only in a small four story office building that is the legal HQ of 15,000+ companies.
Super nice
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...
You had a better experience than I had. Bought a Gateway, the cheap hard disk in it went back within a few weeks. Took two calls to support (each putting me on hold for maybe 45 minutes) to get them to admit the hard disk was bad and each call was quite long I remember.
They sent out a raw hard disk and I had to install Windows and all the drivers by hand over the weekend because of course it is my fault they used the cheapest drives they could find.
I think they charged me for the new drive and said they would rebate it if they got the old drive back within a month. I think I was able to use the package they sent the replacement in to mail the disk back, but I had to pay the postage.
Good riddance to a bad company.
Even with a lower frame rate gameplay is relatively smooth with having a fixed-timestamp mode [2].
The biggest difference in performance is the sound backend [3]. Gravis Ultrasound and Adlib for some reason halve the framerate on all cpus and it's the next challenge to point Claude at.
1. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/blob/main/docs/FPS-MATR...
2. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/tree/main#fixed-timeste...
3. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/blob/main/docs/SOUND.md
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.
I was spending all my time learning computers, and I was starting to build systems for family and friends. Once I was lent out to another Radio Shack store that was short handed and the other salesmen kinda lamented not being able to afford the Compaq a customer was buying. Afterwords, I tried to explain to him that I could easily build him a nicer system for a fraction of what we sold Compaq's for. He was still not interested, I think he was way more broke than I realized. I grew up broke too, but I also had my eyes set on improving my situation. Was kind of a wake-up-moment that most people around me had minimal ambition about this.
I also remember having to push cell phones at RS then too, I think we pushed a lot of Sprint phones. I was still fairly young and was just learning about phreaking, but I remember my boss telling people Sprint phones couldn't be cloned like analog cell phones could back then (I disagreed, but I had to agree it was harder at least). It was apparently a thing that your analog cell phone could be cloned over the air and suddenly your bill would be crazy that month. I only ever heard rumors about that kind of thing happening.
I feel like I'm missing something, because it's not clear at all why that would be your takeaway. Why would "not trusting a temporary employee that I don't usually work with to allocate my home computer budget" somehow imply "broke and unwilling to do anything about it"? Without more detail, that seems like a kinda weird inference to make.
Sadly I don't think the store stayed open much more than a year.
Poor choice of title.
“But you have seen them.”
"tl;dr While I do exaggerate the “badness” of 80s tech ads to make things more fun, a nostalgic ad is not the same thing as an effective ad. What we see in advertising today is so depressing because it is often so bland AND more effective than its more playful predecessors."
They are fun to look at now. And soooo much more creative than marketing crap from today. But they're still 12-page long marketing gimmicks. I'd still take them over today's ads any day of the week, and that's why I spend dozens of hours every month tracking them down and learning their stories
https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/bad-ads-define...
(I know why. It’s way safer and we’re in dangerous times. Conservative personalities grow in times of pain. It still makes me sad.)
I was born in cringe. I grew up in cringe. I plan to be buried in a box made up of my cringe. All with a smile on my face.
Then again, it's not like they're 3dfx-level good:
I set up perhaps a hundred of them in those years and did RMAs etc. They were good machines for the time, was happy with support. Built my own Frankenstein from extra parts.
As GW tripped over itself a few times we gradually started moving to Dells. :-/
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.
Related: https://www.printmag.com/design-trends/flat-logos-with-alex-...
not a bad time to be a kid.
What I came to learn later was that TSS was IBM's PC service division which it had sold off to Kodak just a few years prior. I spent most of my time doing contracted in-home PC repair for all the major PC brands of the era, including Gateway. I'd get a service call (on a RIM bullfrog two-way pager), call the customer and tell them "Hi, I'm with <major brand computer>, give me directions to your house and I'll fix your system". Most of the consumer PC manufacturers were unequipped to provide any kind of in-field repair service on their products, so they hired TSS for this. If you bought any kind of extended warranty on your PC then you were paying for TSS to show up on-site at your home to fix it. Apparently this was better than regional central repair hubs.
Let me tell you, there were some seriously crazy stories from the front line. Most of our work was through Sears for Packard Bell (cheapest machines sell higher volume and therefore require the most service, not even counting for PB's lower quality). We serviced Acer, Sony Vaio, Gateway, Dell, and other brands, and did other point-of-sale and other contract work. I remember servicing the Gateway Destination system - that 35" CRT was huge for even a TV at that time. But being up close I realized it actually kinda sucked to use as a computer monitor. People tried to set them up in their living rooms, so imagine using your computer in the living room instead of an office, and required sitting next to the 35" display meant you saw the CRT up close which just meant the low resolution was blown up larger and you could see the physically larger pixels up close.
So yea, showing up to peoples houses meant going to a lot of random peoples houses which was mostly fine, but occasionally terrible. I had multiple instances of working on computers in a house having brownouts. "So wait, the computer reboots when the lights in the house flicker? And dispatch has sent me out with a new display for you... yea, you're gonna have to get the power company out here...". One time, I was sent to a house that was barely a shack in the woods. Main room had a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. That call in particular stands out in my mind, nice people, a 70 year skinny old dude in overalls and a 400' bearded lady in a shack. I couldn't do anything to make their Gatway machine work better as it was the power lines (lightbulb was visibly flickering the whole time I was there, that poor PC never stood a chance), so I showed her how to play her music CD's in PC (between power sags that crashed the machine) and she was tickled pink. One of my trainers had a couple horror stories: one dudes house was an underground bunker. My coworker was sent to replace a modem. After, the client couldn't find his Solitaire on his desktop, so he locked the door and demanded my coworker fix his Solitaire game before he could leave. My coworker obviously had nothing to do with that issue, but he recreated the shortcut to the desktop and was set free.
Eventually I jumped ship from TSS to IBM proper, it was a fun adventure. But that year and a half slinging in-home service calls in the evenings was an interesting time.
They must have negotiated some hefty discounts, because page rates were astronomical.
Even so - the incredible thing about PC magazines was that they were read by people who wanted to buy PCs, so the ROI on that kind of niche targeted ad spend was always worthy.