Posted by rfarley04 5 hours ago
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...
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
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'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.
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!
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').
Super nice
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.
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: