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- Hacker News
- Hilariously good. Imo they worked on me. I can quote Gateway 4DX622 at $1899 OTOH of my head now. And it got me to read the whole thing.by demo4567
- Written by geeks for geeks. Not the case today, the typical consumer market e.g. Apple is much bigger now.by mixmastamyk
- 4DX266 isn't it? I had that exact spec as a kid, still remember the big cow patterned boxes it came inby richiezc
- Mid 90s I worked IT in aerospace. Had a pretty big facility and when I joined they were using Gateway PCs for everything (besides Mac and Unix workstations.)
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. :-/
by mixmastamyk - FWIW I love 90s ads, especially the video game ads. Electronic Gaming Monthly would bombard you with "extreme in your face 'tude" for even the most prosaic games. I loved the Gaiares ad, with a mulleted, chain wearing professional gamer Jamie Bunker saying "this game really smokes."by runamuck
- I loved their ads.
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.
by geophile - “These are the worst ads I’ve ever seen.”
“But you have seen them.”
by raldi - These old Gateway ads made me remember ads a vendor ran in Computer Shopper featuring bikini-clad women. Their ads weren't as good as Gateway's, I guess, because I can't remember their name.by EvanAnderson
- Agreed. They are good ads if we're still discussing them. This is one of those critics that assumes the current times are the 'correct taste' and anything foreign to their taste is poorly done, even when it resulted in sales.by 1970-01-01
- Not sure how bad the ads are if we're talking about them 30 years later.
Then again, it's not like they're 3dfx-level good:
by rl3 - What exactly was "bad" about these ads? They're eye catching, and it definitely interested me as a reader.
Poor choice of title.
- Agreed. I remember those ads, and I kinda liked them. They had personality. The other PC ads were just tech specs - boring.by jimt1234
- As an advertiser these are unusual but the clear strategy their marketing team took was to make their ads entertaining enough for people to want to read them.by cm2012
- I worked at a mall Radio Shack in ‘98-‘99. A Gateway store opened up at the other end of the mall. This being the times they were, Radio Shack had partnered with Compaq to sell P2 & (I think) P3 desktops, the beginning of its downfall of selling other companies’ stuff and losing out to places like Best Buy.
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.
by incanus77 - I worked at Best Buy and when the Gateway country store opened up they came in and offered most of our sales floor employees big raises and benefits.
Sadly I don't think the store stayed open much more than a year.
by bluedino - Before I worked at TSS doing in-home PC repair, I did a short stint at Radio Shack and got the Compaq experience you described. I remember going to the introduction event for the Compaq roll-out into Radio Shack stores, I was sitting in a large hotel ballroom with like 100 other Radio Shack sales folks. The Compaq guy was asking questions from the audience and I was literally the only person there who could answer questions like "what motherboard interface did the Pentium 2 use" (it was the first cpu to use a slot (Slot 1) versus a socket which was a big deal back then). I had dropped into the event straight after class at ITT, so I was just wearing casual attire and didn't think anything of it. Apparently that was a mistake, one of the higher up sales guys got offended and complained to my manager. I was offended that apparently no one else there knew anything technical at all, lol. Thankfully I left that job not long after.
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.
by dosman33 - As a young Midwestern nerd in the 90s, getting one of those cow boxes delivered to our home was better than Christmas. (Christmas happens every year!). Somehow I can still remember the new computer smell…by gammarator
- I went from an unknown intel processor (pre-celeron) I think doing like ~75mhz and 2gb hard drive w/ 8mb ram to a gateway computer P4 w/ 1.3 or 1.4 GHZ, 40gb HD, and 128mb of ram - it was insane the jump. I do give credit to that old machine as I learned so much trying to optimize that processor to do things my friends were doing on their faster machines. Crazy times.by niwtsol
- These ads feel like a mental cleanse compared to ads now, which are focus grouped (and now AI polished) until there is nothing left but soulless gray goo, devoid of any personality whatsoever. Nice to see color again on the You Got It, Baby ad.
Related: https://www.printmag.com/design-trends/flat-logos-with-alex-...
by Mistletoe - 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.
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...
by ecliptik - For DOS, your choices are basically DJGPP C compiler, or using the HXDOS DOS extender. But how well would Cave Story work on 50MHz?by Dwedit
- >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.
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.
by opo - For a while in the 90's, I did Gateway 2000 tech support. It's nice to hear you had a good experience :) The mandate was to move quickly while also solving the customer's problem (which is harder than it sounds over the phone).by redm
- > 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 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.
by sgarland - > We got a Pentium III 550 MHz screamer
Super nice
by timcobb - 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.by mrloopex
- > They would also give you a PC in agreement for continued employment for N years.
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."
by addaon - Gateway was located in Sioux City, IA before they moved to South Dakota in 1990: https://medium.com/@madmedic11671/behind-the-spots-the-story...
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!
- You're right! That was a not entirely clear enough reference to Gateway 2000's first ad, in 1987, which famously used the headline "Computers from Iowa?"
https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/gateway-2000-p...
by rfarley04