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Michael D. Hammond, Co-Founder of Gateway, Is Dead at 53
- intrasight 11y agoNever bought one of 'em, but Rest In Peace Mr Hammond.
- yuhong 11y agoIt is funny how the PC market quickly commoditized. In retrospect I think the idea of a "prebuilt" might have been a bad idea in the first place.
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoIt'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. It's different if you want a gamer box.
- yuhong 11y agoAnd the OEM gets paid for installing crapware too.
- noir_lord 11y agoI 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.
- crabasa 11y agoMy 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.
- rhowell 11y agoMy first computer was the very same! I remember it had an optional external cache; it was 128kb for $200+ I believe. I doubt I'd be where I am today if my parents hadn't given in and surprised me that Christmas. The view sonic monitor passed away, but the computer is still ticking at my folks place.
- crabasa 11y agoDitto. 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.
- ronyeh 11y agoWow, 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.
- chipotle_coyote 11y agoMy 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.
- SandB0x 11y agoI had exactly the same. With MMX!
- codezero 11y agoDitto. Mine was a 486 DX/33 with a 512K Western Digital video card and 500Mb hard drive. Around 1991.
- balls187 11y agoThat math-co processor made all the difference in games.
- beachstartup 11y agofirst 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.
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- webwanderings 11y agoI posted this one day ago and it was buried. How strange!
- melling 11y agoThis happens all the time. The iPhone 6s review that was in the top 10 today, for example, was posted a few times before it gained traction: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=iphone%206s%20review&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=iphone%206s%20review&sort=byPo... This story was posted 3 times: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Gateway%20founder&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Gateway%20founder&sort=byPopul...
- strictnein 11y agoActually 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.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rmason 11y agoMichigan's current governor, Rick Snyder, is a former Gateway CEO whose time at the company dates back to 1991. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Snyder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Snyder
- adventured 11y ago> 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.
- fpgeek 11y agoYes 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.
- yuhong 11y agoAnd that was after Dell and Gateway did something similar to Compaq forcing them to change.
- agumonkey 11y agoI 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 ?
- ghaff 11y agoThere 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.)
- agumonkey 11y agoSince 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
- bad_user 11y agoMy 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.
- wittekm 11y agoHis poor kids - their mother died 4 to 5 months ago. :(
- wyclif 11y agoHis wife died recently. I wonder how much that had to do with this sad news.
- at-fates-hands 11y agoI noticed that too and had the same thought. Sounds like he was still doing fine though with his muscle car business: http://www.dakotamuscle.com/index.html http://www.dakotamuscle.com/index.html Looks like they do some cool stuff.
- contingencies 11y agoDoes 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.
- mschaef 11y agoI'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.
- rbanffy 11y agoA 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".
- LordKano 11y agoI'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.
- hipsterrific 11y agoMy 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. All that to say, I miss that old Gateway PC.
- Albright 11y agoHe will be buried in a cowprint-patterend coffin. …sorry.
- rosege 11y agoI ordered one but while it was being processed the company went belly up. Luckily my mum was able to get a refund through her credit card