My first "prebuilt" PC was from Gateway, sometime in the late '90s -- it was a Pentium 166, back when that was considered a pretty big deal, and it had the very first 3dfx graphics card in it (which was also a pretty big deal then). I'm not sure there was anything particularly special about it, but it seemed well-built.
It's interesting that this is the first time I remember hearing of Hammond, though. Back in the day his co-founder Ted Waitt was the one in the public eye. Wikipedia describes Waitt as "an American billionaire philanthropist who was a co-founder of Gateway, Inc.," and Waitt still lives in Southern California; from appearances, Hammond moved back to Iowa and started a custom car repair business. It's hard not to wonder if he got written out of Gateway's fortune as well as their public history.
I still have my 1989 motherboard-- 386, 1 megabyte of RAM, 80MB hard drive... I remember booting it up for the first time and DOS reporting only 640K of memory and calling them up to wonder where the rest of it went. They were very nice about explaining it to me over the phone.
(...hah, I still have the letter confirming my order. "We welcome you as a Gateway 2000 customer and have a good day!" Nostalgia2k for the cow boxes!)
My dad bought a 386 DX-20, 4 MB of RAM, 80 MB hard drive, from the original "Computers from Iowa?" ad in PC Magazine. I finally sent it to the recyclers about a year and a half ago. (The only old computer I kept was a TRS-80 model 1 level 2.)
Gateway 2000 was such a great company in that era.
Crazy how this went on. Nvidia started with a failed product in the business while 3dfx was the prodigal son. The 'deluxe' product strategy didn't sustain, 3dfx couldn't pull an Apple I guess.
In my opinion, Nvidia took over the market because they picked up the pieces from SGI when the company failed. SGI had all of the engineering talent to make a world class 3D chip for PC gaming but SGI management was too busy clinging to the dying unix workstation market.
And that's probably why they failed at first (NV1 chipset). They came with advanced Mathematics (quadratic patches) and CAD use cases which didn't align with the video game market at the time.
It's funny because 10 years earlier, TDI released the 3D software package Explore with the same idea, bringing advanced mathematical geometry (full Nurbs), again far too early for the market. They ended up swallowed by Alias|Wavefront.
Video games have become such a huge phenomenon. I think they're even bigger than movies. Nobody saw that coming. They though it was all about business use cases. Tiny tiny market in comparison. Now with "deep learning" there may be a serious use case for huge clusters of GPU machines.
Last night the TV news had a big segment on the candy crush acquisition. It's becoming nation mainstream and an economic matter. Can I have my GameBoy back please ?
I'll jump in here too. First was a Gateway, Pentium II 400Mhz, slot 1. I tried to save a bit of cash by downgrading the memory from 128MB to 96MB, which I regretted in retrospect. But I took the option to add both a 16MB STB RivaTNT (2D and OpenGL) and a 8MB 3Dfx Voodoo2. Now I could do both OpenGL and Glide! w00t! And what was whacky at the time, an LS-120 drive, which read both 3.5in floppies and a 3.5in 120MB disk. For my friend and I who both had one, it was a great way to share files. (Our cable modems an the first CD-Rs would pretty much make this obsolete a year later though.) Sound was via a SoundBlaster "Live!". Gosh, I was thrilled. I'd saved a long while for it, and boy it delivered. I really got my IT career started while learning on that box.
I was amazed at how long that PC lasted. It used the Intel 440BX chipset, which meant I could later upgrade that 400MHz PII to a 800MHz PIII Coppermine. Videocard was upgrade to a Voodoo5. The card just barely fit. =P I later filled it with some more hard drives and a DVD reader.
I get strangely teary-eyed when I think back to those days of Win98 and Descent, connecting to the internet and really getting to know how the insides worked. We've much better devices now, but I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for that Gateway PC.
Your post has brought back so many memories - the slot 1 connector, the LS-120s, the 440BX chipset.. but what especially the voodoo 5! I laugh every time I think of that card.
first prebuilt pc was a gw2k p120 when i was in middle school. also the first computer i installed linux on - slackware. we started on macs but they had gone downhill by then.
this was way before the era of cheap multi function routers. it lasted me/my family 10 years (performing various server-ish functions including firewall/router, print server, file server, etc.) and taught me the skills i use every day to make a living. i believe it was still working just fine when we recycled it, it was just too power hungry compared to newer machines.
>this was way before the era of cheap multi function routers.
Indeed! One of the first things I did with mine was turn it into a sort of router. I was taking a Cisco class in high school where we were learning networking. Realized I could connect the two PCs in our house together to share the same dial-up connection, and so I walked out of school with some donated Cat5, crimpers, and a pair of 3Com NICs. Microsoft ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) did the rest.
The only issue it created was that, in the process of explaining to my parents that my PC had to be turned on in order for theirs to reach the net, they continued to ask for years if my PC was on, long after we had a router. I still get a question occasionally like "my tablet isn't working, does your father's PC need to be on?"
That takes me back. I learnt Unix, networking, and software development setting up ever more complex (and in retrospect unnecessary) services for the family home network. At one point I was even selling web hosting to a few people off our home connection.
That experience is led to me being where I am now, and I'm eternely grateful to my parents for supporting me in doing a bunch of stuff they really had no idea about.
My family's first computer was a Gateway 2000. 486 25Mhz SX (no math coprocessor). Was worried it would have trouble running Wing Commander, but it ran just fine. I was sad to see the company go by the wayside, but they were victims of the PC industry's commoditization.
Wow, a bunch of us must have had the same computer. Mine even came with a 1X CD-ROM. Unfortunately I found out the hard way that my copy of 7th Guest didn't run well on it. The animation was super choppy, since it recommended a 2X CD-ROM... :-( I don't recall if I was able to return the boxed software to the store.
Luckily, Microsoft Encarta and Microsoft Dinosaurs, which came with bundled with my Gateway 2000, ran fine.
Ditto. I learned how to program Basic and Pascal on my Gateway. It was also the device that I connected my first modem to. First Prodigy, then AOL, then this weird little thing called the World Wide Web.
Actually worked for Gateway for a very short stint in one of their stores. I had just left Circuit City, who then went bankrupt, and moved over to Gateway, who then shut down their stores a month after I left. Years later I was doing contract dev work at Best Buy. A lot of the managers there didn't like that story, and looked at me as the bringer of darkness or something.
The POS system at the Gateway stores was identical to the ones used in the call centers (from what I understood). They were absolutely not meant for retail use and were confusing as hell. The one great thing though was that you could sell people on the idea that that they could bring their computers into the store to get worked on and that work would be covered under warranty. And that was true, until they shut the stores down. I felt bad about all of those 3-5 year service plans I sold. At least they weren't as expensive as CC or Best Buy plans.
I'm sorry to hear of Mr. Hammond's early passing. My family had a couple computers before, but the first computer that was really mine was a Gateway 2000 486/33. I think I got it around 1991 or 1992. The first and only time I've ever bought MS Windows in a retail box was Windows 3.0 for an older 386sx/16... The Gateway was the first of a continual sequence of machines that shipped with a Windows license built in.
For the time, the machine was relatively sophisticated. It had 8MB of memory and an ATI Mach 8 based graphics accelerator that was basically a single board combination of an 8514/A clone and a VGA Wonder. It drove the upgrade 15" monitor fairly well at 1024x768x8bpp. Over the life of the machine, I added a 400MB disk, a CD-ROM, a 17" monitor and converted it over to Linux 0.9something. It made a fairly reasonable low-end Linux workstation for a kid studying computer science.
Where the machine started to age was in memory capacity and bus bandwidth. Our machine was bought just before VLB became common, so all I/O had to be done over a 1984-era 8MHz 16-bit bus. This particularly killed video performance for anything beyond 8bpp. The 8MB of RAM was also pretty thin by the time Linux was running with X and Emacs. Emacs got the nickname 'Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping' for a good reason, as far as I could tell. Neither of those issues could be addressed without effectively replacing the entire machine, so I wound up replacing it with a later Micron P5-100. Either way, the Gateway was a great machine and very formative for me. RIP, Mr. Hammond.
It's not if you can find the processor/mobo combo you'd build anyway. I've done the spreadsheet every time, and it comes down to hiding the cost of a VAR version of Windows.
I'll put up with two hours of deinstalling crapware for that.
I still build my machines even though I'm no longer a gamer.
Mostly because I still find it cheaper than a pre-built and I know that all the components are quality (good PSU) and that I won't run into any vendor specific bios issues, locked out stuff etc.
That and I can fully stack out the RAM on whatever I build a lot cheaper.
My first prebuilt was a Gateway Intel Pentium II 400Mhz. It had a decent gaming card (AGP) and a Soundblaster sound card. Oh the days when I used to game on that PC. Then I got gutsy and built my own, haven't looked back since. I remember the Gateway sat on the wayside until I took it out and put in a Pentium III 400Mhz CPU on there, marginally faster than the Pentium II. I doubled the RAM, added a new HDD, and gave it away to a friend. It served my friend well.
Since systemd bind gateway/ to the main network gateway, everytime I have to operate my ISP box I think about them...
My parends couldn't afford Gateway2000 so I could only fantasize hard on magazines. A friend got one at christmas though, full with a Matrox Millenium (1M ? 4M ... can't recall) card IIRC. I was stuck with my hyundai monitor and generic ATX tower :) #nostalgia
I also remember fantasizing a lot on the Gateway2000, or actually any computer that ran Win95. I was stuck with an Amstrad 8086, DOS and GW-Basic. Pretty much no games. Fantasizing was 50% of my education to IT ;)
I'm sorry to hear of this. I was impressed by his company.
I had seen and heard about Gateway 2000 computers before but my first experience with one came in 1998. I was working part time in a computer shop and they had a room full of old dead computers. I got the OK from the boss to take some scrap parts to build something for myself. I selected an old Gateway 2000 486 and brought it back to life and that was the machine that I used to learn about Linux.
I was impressed at how much different(better) it was compared to the Packard Bell and Compaq computers that seemed to be everywhere at the time.
I botched an attempt at a BIOS upgrade and bricked the machine. Gateway had extensive documentation and utilities available on their website. I found that there was a recovery jumper and a recovery floppy image. I downloaded the image, wrote it to floppy, set the jumper and restored the BIOS.
I was a fan of Gateway 2000 from that day forward.
A Gateway 2000 desktop machine was one of the first servers on the first large Brazilian news portal. It ran Linux and its job was to sync the portal contents being served out of an NT machine to the Sun boxes that actually served the content. It was a crucial piece of hardware, improvised like almost everything else on those heroic days.
Many years later I spotted it quietly humming, doing something, on one of the shelves dedicated to odd-format machines.
It was named after one of the rivers that join to form the Amazon. Even though it was pale white, its hostname was "Negro".
Does anyone else remember the Gateway squishy cows? I think they were intended as stress toys but they became a cultural phenomenon, at least in my circles.
My first PC was also from Gateway 2000. It was a i486DX2-66.
What I really learned to appreciate about my Gateway PC is that it didn't have a warranty seal. On the contrary, the introductory manual and the introductory multi-media application it shipped with was encouraging users to take a screwdriver and take a look inside. And so I did just that. And I enjoyed it very much. I miss those days.
> But facing increasing pressure from Dell and the resurgence of Apple in the personal computer market, Gateway’s business stalled.
I watched a lot of people buy Gateway systems from the mid 1990s to ~2004, it wasn't Dell or Apple that caused Gateway's business to stall - it was quality. The product got worse and worse. Gateway did themselves in.
Yes and no. From a customer perspective, I'm sure declining quality did them in. But that declining quality didn't happen in a vacuum.
From what I remember, Dell did a much better job of managing supply chain costs than Gateway did. I suspect that the declining quality was Gateway cutting corners to remain price-competitive with them. It's quite possible Gateway could have maintained quality at higher prices, but that would have just been a different way to die (and quite possibly a faster one - declining quality takes more time to recognize than higher prices, plus Apple's resurgence would have complicated any plan to go after the high end). Either way, pressure from Dell is what backed Gateway into that corner in the first place, so it is entirely reasonable to attribute Gateway's problems to them.
I wonder now, should they have kept their quality level even at higher prices and keep some value in the brand (at the cost of shrinking sales of course). If you adapt by lowering the proposition don't you fade away faster ?
There wasn't really a market for premium Wintel boxes other than the gaming makers and they were a niche. (And even Alienware ended up selling out to Dell.)
When I think of Gateway, I think of their lawsuit against Alan Clegg over the domain gateway.com. Clegg registered the domain in 1990 for his consulting business, back when Gateway was known as Gateway 2000. A year before Gateway 2000 changed their name to Gateway in 1998, and then went after Clegg for trademark infringement. Ultimately Gateway lost the lawsuit and settled out of court with Clegg but I'll always think of them as a bully.
I think that GW2K was one of the first companies (if not the first) to ship PC-compatible machines without parity memory. The low-margin industry followed, and pretty soon all peecees were non-parity, non-ECC. The public doesn't understand that they pay for that in reliability. (Me, I buy Xeons. We shouldn't have to worry about single-bit errors.)
It's interesting that this is the first time I remember hearing of Hammond, though. Back in the day his co-founder Ted Waitt was the one in the public eye. Wikipedia describes Waitt as "an American billionaire philanthropist who was a co-founder of Gateway, Inc.," and Waitt still lives in Southern California; from appearances, Hammond moved back to Iowa and started a custom car repair business. It's hard not to wonder if he got written out of Gateway's fortune as well as their public history.