As a customer, the late 90s were the absolutely most frustrating time to deal with computer customer support. In virtually every case, it was obvious that the

As a customer, the late 90s were the absolutely most frustrating time to deal with computer customer support. In virtually every case, it was obvious that the customer support person was simply reading from a support database that the company hadn't bothered to put on the web yet, and yet to get these answers it was necessary to let the operator, who generally had no tech knowlege, walk you through a long script of repeating obvious steps until finally you would get to step 50 in their script that said "if you get error 87AB with an nvidia graphics driver, you must frazz the foo in the bios settings", which is all I wanted in the first place. Gateway was one of the worst, since they generally had OEM versions of hardware that required special driver settings that were completely undocumented. Since this type of thing is generally online now, I honestly don't think I've called customer support for any personal product in over 15 years.