4 ms·

Gateway 2000's hilariously bad ads in the 90s (Part II)

122 points by rfarley04 2mo ago

cm2012 2mo ago
As someone who is a student of advertising, I love this post. Just subscribed to this
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
gammarator 2mo ago
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…
- niwtsol 2mo ago
  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.
demo4567 2mo ago
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.
- richiezc 2mo ago
  4DX266 isn't it? I had that exact spec as a kid, still remember the big cow patterned boxes it came in
- mixmastamyk 2mo ago
  Written by geeks for geeks. Not the case today, the typical consumer market e.g. Apple is much bigger now.
sgarland 2mo ago
> 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.
- rfarley04 2mo ago
  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-part-1/ https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/gateway-2000-p...
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - sgarland 2mo ago
    Ah, right. Good callout!
- addaon 2mo ago
  > 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."
  - majormajor 2mo ago
    Usually signing bonuses are "pay back all or a pro-rated percentage if you leave before [date]"
Mistletoe 2mo ago
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-center/ https://www.printmag.com/design-trends/flat-logos-with-alex-...
wduquette 2mo ago
I had at least one Gateway 2000 desktop and several laptops over time. All but the last laptop were lovely machines. The last looked good on paper, but it was thicker and heavier than it should have been, and start losing keycaps fairly quickly.
doctorzook 2mo ago
I love that these ads had (cornball) personality.
raldi 2mo ago
“These are the worst ads I’ve ever seen.” “But you have seen them.”
- 1970-01-01 2mo ago
  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.
  - bink 2mo ago
    I think there's "bad" in the sense that it didn't accomplish the goal of selling a product (maybe not the case here) and "bad" in the sense that it made many readers cringe or was seen as stupid/tacky. I'm seeing more of the latter in these ads.
    - t-writescode 2mo ago
      Young people cringe too much. Personality is good. Why does everyone want to find themselves on a safe, but boring, ranking system? (I know why. It’s way safer and we’re in dangerous times. Conservative personalities grow in times of pain. It still makes me sad.)
      - monocasa 2mo ago
        I tell young people that cringe is just a cage of the mind. I was born in cringe. I grew up in cringe. I plan to be buried in a box made up of my cringe. All with a smile on my face.
  - rfarley04 2mo ago
    Author here, from another issue I sent about my definition of bad ads for this newsletter: "tl;dr While I do exaggerate the “badness” of 80s tech ads to make things more fun, a nostalgic ad is not the same thing as an effective ad. What we see in advertising today is so depressing because it is often so bland AND more effective than its more playful predecessors." They are fun to look at now. And soooo much more creative than marketing crap from today. But they're still 12-page long marketing gimmicks. I'd still take them over today's ads any day of the week, and that's why I spend dozens of hours every month tracking them down and learning their stories https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/bad-ads-defined/ https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/bad-ads-define...
grubbs 2mo ago
I think it was around the late 90s - but my hometown actually had a Gateway retail store where you could tinker with a lot of their products.
- jeffbee 2mo ago
  When they opened retail outlets it was the beginning of the end. That was the peak of their growth rate and the moment when Dell really started to go after them.
ecliptik 2mo ago
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=PA48-IA16#v=twopage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=L2RD68Gg2sMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA... 2. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/ https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/ 3. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YLFztifZKQ8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YLFztifZKQ8
- Dwedit 2mo ago
  For DOS, your choices are basically DJGPP C compiler, or using the HXDOS DOS extender. But how well would Cave Story work on 50MHz?
  - ecliptik 2mo ago
    I've am working my way through benchmarking it on a few different CPUS [1]. A Pentium Overdrive 83MHz gets around 30fps, and the 486DX2-66MHz around 20fps. Because the 50MHz will use a bus speed to 25MHz I am expecting it to be 10-15fps. 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-MATRIX.md https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/blob/main/docs/FPS-MATR... 2. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/tree/main#fixed-timestep-mode https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/tree/main#fixed-timeste... 3. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/blob/main/docs/SOUND.md https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/blob/main/docs/SOUND.md
- redm 2mo ago
  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).
VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
What exactly was "bad" about these ads? They're eye catching, and it definitely interested me as a reader. Poor choice of title.
- jimt1234 2mo ago
  Agreed. I remember those ads, and I kinda liked them. They had personality. The other PC ads were just tech specs - boring.
- cm2012 2mo ago
  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.
  - spacedcowboy 2mo ago
    Yep, I’m generally not an advert person, but even I remember the cow adverts in the otherwise staid PCW mag. I think the only test of advertising is if it works. This seems to have worked on me…
Aeroi 2mo ago
I wrote a tweet a few months ago about how Gateway cow branding would crush it in 2026. those ads are amazing.
incanus77 2mo ago
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.
- bluedino 2mo ago
  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.
- dosman33 2mo ago
  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.
geophile 2mo ago
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.
rl3 2mo ago
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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35027437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35027437
a-dub 2mo ago
ahh yes, the early 90s. computer shopper, datanet, pc magazine, a $59 seller's permit from the state of california that came with a magic number that would make distributors sell to you at cost for both computer and bike parts, automated touch tone fax back information systems, the absolute cheapest xt clone that could be assembled from parts from the computer shopper, ups cash on delivery, genie, prodigy, the bbs scene, the dreaded "rma number" and the subsequent wait, searching the space of physical card positions, jumper settings and tsr drivers that would allow the mouse, the soundcard and the game to all work at the same time, the borland compiler suite, mark williams coherent, os/2 2.0, trumpet winsock, slackware linux floppies... not a bad time to be a kid.
- bluedino 2mo ago
  Borrowed my mothers credit card to buy a modem and sound card from Surplus Software, it was like a miracle when an Airborne Express van showed up the next day with my goods.
imthenitto 2mo ago
[flagged]
dosman33 2mo ago
These old ads are great, really takes me back to that era. In the mid to late 1990's I was a pimply faced youth in community college and picked up a part time job doing "PC repair". I couldn't put my finger on it, but the outfit carried itself like it was a major corporation despite being a small office, it was called TSS (Technology Service Solutions). The majority of the other guys were always working in the field so I wouldn't get to know them until many months later. When I got my first paycheck (physical paper), it said IBM on it. I asked my boss why this was and he nonchalantly said "we just use IBM's payroll system". I was very confused but didn't ask any further questions. What I came to learn later was that TSS was IBM's PC service division which it had sold off to Kodak just a few years prior. I spent most of my time doing contracted in-home PC repair for all the major PC brands of the era, including Gateway. I'd get a service call (on a RIM bullfrog two-way pager), call the customer and tell them "Hi, I'm with <major brand computer>, give me directions to your house and I'll fix your system". Most of the consumer PC manufacturers were unequipped to provide any kind of in-field repair service on their products, so they hired TSS for this. If you bought any kind of extended warranty on your PC then you were paying for TSS to show up on-site at your home to fix it. Apparently this was better than regional central repair hubs. Let me tell you, there were some seriously crazy stories from the front line. Most of our work was through Sears for Packard Bell (cheapest machines sell higher volume and therefore require the most service, not even counting for PB's lower quality). We serviced Acer, Sony Vaio, Gateway, Dell, and other brands, and did other point-of-sale and other contract work. I remember servicing the Gateway Destination system - that 35" CRT was huge for even a TV at that time. But being up close I realized it actually kinda sucked to use as a computer monitor. People tried to set them up in their living rooms, so imagine using your computer in the living room instead of an office, and required sitting next to the 35" display meant you saw the CRT up close which just meant the low resolution was blown up larger and you could see the physically larger pixels up close. So yea, showing up to peoples houses meant going to a lot of random peoples houses which was mostly fine, but occasionally terrible. I had multiple instances of working on computers in a house having brownouts. "So wait, the computer reboots when the lights in the house flicker? And dispatch has sent me out with a new display for you... yea, you're gonna have to get the power company out here...". One time, I was sent to a house that was barely a shack in the woods. Main room had a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. That call in particular stands out in my mind, nice people, a 70 year skinny old dude in overalls and a 400' bearded lady in a shack. I couldn't do anything to make their Gatway machine work better as it was the power lines (lightbulb was visibly flickering the whole time I was there, that poor PC never stood a chance), so I showed her how to play her music CD's in PC (between power sags that crashed the machine) and she was tickled pink. One of my trainers had a couple horror stories: one dudes house was an underground bunker. My coworker was sent to replace a modem. After, the client couldn't find his Solitaire on his desktop, so he locked the door and demanded my coworker fix his Solitaire game before he could leave. My coworker obviously had nothing to do with that issue, but he recreated the shortcut to the desktop and was set free. Eventually I jumped ship from TSS to IBM proper, it was a fun adventure. But that year and a half slinging in-home service calls in the evenings was an interesting time.
jonhohle 2mo ago
Gateway 2000 (and subsequently Gateway) was one of my favorite of brands. It was like the Bikes Direct of PC brands - the components you care about on a frame that you don’t.
fenestella 2mo ago
The cow-print branding was a masterclass in building an approachable identity for a commodity business, but these specific spreads really highlight how weird 90s tech marketing was. I'd forgotten they tried to lean so hard into the 'cowboy' persona for a PC builder. It's wild to see how much margin they must have had to afford these multi-page glossy inserts in every issue of PC Magazine.
- TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
  It wasn't just PC Magazine, it was every PC magazine. They must have negotiated some hefty discounts, because page rates were astronomical. Even so - the incredible thing about PC magazines was that they were read by people who wanted to buy PCs, so the ROI on that kind of niche targeted ad spend was always worthy.
SalaevAl 2mo ago
This brings back memories. In my city, there were no computers for sale in regular stores in the early 90s. My first computer was a second-hand ZX Spectrum. I still remember how excited I was when I finally got one.
gidellav 2mo ago
Honestly it's better to have bad but fun ads than those sterile corporate design used nowadays.
userbinator 2mo ago
I seem to remember computer ads in 90s had lots of rural and farming-related elements; I wonder if that was an attempt to appeal to the part of the population that probably had the least idea what a computer was. At that time I also recall some jokes about "the farmer in the Dell".
- EvanAnderson 2mo ago
  Another sizeable PC vendor, Midwest Micro (also traded under the name Systemax), was headquartered near the sub-1,000 population town of Fletcher, OH (out amidst farm fields). I can't say I remember their ads specifically, but I could see rural theming being a thing with them.
mixmastamyk 2mo ago
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. :-/
runamuck 2mo ago
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."
zabzonk 2mo ago
LTT did a very funny video on bad tech ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXVeSJ1WAt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXVeSJ1WAt0
ratana 2mo ago
I didn't have a Gateway 2000, but my friend did, and it came with an amazing keyboard with programmable macros. I was able to get one of those and used it for a few years, and never understood why such a thing wasn't more common.
- duxup 2mo ago
  That was the Gateway AnyKey keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_AnyKey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_AnyKey
- dolmen 2mo ago
  I kept using the AnyKey keyboard long after I replaced my P5-90 with a newer home-assembled Celeron.
srj 2mo ago
I still have my foam gateway cow!
- EvanAnderson 2mo ago
  I had a Customer who bought tons of Gateway PCs. They had a "pasture" cubicle full of foam cows. It was quite a sight. A friend of mine had a Gateway PC at home (the first Pentium Pro I ever saw-- his stepfather splurged on it). The dog got ahold of the foam cow and tore a leg off, so my friend used markers to draw on "gore". I'll never forget the maimed Gateway cow.

122 points by rfarley04 2mo ago

cm2012 2mo ago

As someone who is a student of advertising, I love this post. Just subscribed to this

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

gammarator 2mo ago

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…

niwtsol 2mo ago
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.

demo4567 2mo ago

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.

richiezc 2mo ago
4DX266 isn't it? I had that exact spec as a kid, still remember the big cow patterned boxes it came in
mixmastamyk 2mo ago
Written by geeks for geeks. Not the case today, the typical consumer market e.g. Apple is much bigger now.

sgarland 2mo ago

> 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.

rfarley04 2mo ago
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-part-1/ https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/gateway-2000-p...
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- sgarland 2mo ago
  Ah, right. Good callout!
addaon 2mo ago
> 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."
- majormajor 2mo ago
  Usually signing bonuses are "pay back all or a pro-rated percentage if you leave before [date]"

Mistletoe 2mo ago

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-center/ https://www.printmag.com/design-trends/flat-logos-with-alex-...

wduquette 2mo ago

I had at least one Gateway 2000 desktop and several laptops over time. All but the last laptop were lovely machines. The last looked good on paper, but it was thicker and heavier than it should have been, and start losing keycaps fairly quickly.

doctorzook 2mo ago

I love that these ads had (cornball) personality.

raldi 2mo ago

“These are the worst ads I’ve ever seen.” “But you have seen them.”

1970-01-01 2mo ago
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.
- bink 2mo ago
  I think there's "bad" in the sense that it didn't accomplish the goal of selling a product (maybe not the case here) and "bad" in the sense that it made many readers cringe or was seen as stupid/tacky. I'm seeing more of the latter in these ads.
  - t-writescode 2mo ago
    Young people cringe too much. Personality is good. Why does everyone want to find themselves on a safe, but boring, ranking system? (I know why. It’s way safer and we’re in dangerous times. Conservative personalities grow in times of pain. It still makes me sad.)
    - monocasa 2mo ago
      I tell young people that cringe is just a cage of the mind. I was born in cringe. I grew up in cringe. I plan to be buried in a box made up of my cringe. All with a smile on my face.
- rfarley04 2mo ago
  Author here, from another issue I sent about my definition of bad ads for this newsletter: "tl;dr While I do exaggerate the “badness” of 80s tech ads to make things more fun, a nostalgic ad is not the same thing as an effective ad. What we see in advertising today is so depressing because it is often so bland AND more effective than its more playful predecessors." They are fun to look at now. And soooo much more creative than marketing crap from today. But they're still 12-page long marketing gimmicks. I'd still take them over today's ads any day of the week, and that's why I spend dozens of hours every month tracking them down and learning their stories https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/bad-ads-defined/ https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/bad-ads-define...

grubbs 2mo ago

I think it was around the late 90s - but my hometown actually had a Gateway retail store where you could tinker with a lot of their products.

jeffbee 2mo ago
When they opened retail outlets it was the beginning of the end. That was the peak of their growth rate and the moment when Dell really started to go after them.

ecliptik 2mo ago

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=PA48-IA16#v=twopage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=L2RD68Gg2sMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA... 2. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/ https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/ 3. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YLFztifZKQ8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YLFztifZKQ8

Dwedit 2mo ago
For DOS, your choices are basically DJGPP C compiler, or using the HXDOS DOS extender. But how well would Cave Story work on 50MHz?
- ecliptik 2mo ago
  I've am working my way through benchmarking it on a few different CPUS [1]. A Pentium Overdrive 83MHz gets around 30fps, and the 486DX2-66MHz around 20fps. Because the 50MHz will use a bus speed to 25MHz I am expecting it to be 10-15fps. 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-MATRIX.md https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/blob/main/docs/FPS-MATR... 2. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/tree/main#fixed-timestep-mode https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/tree/main#fixed-timeste... 3. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/blob/main/docs/SOUND.md https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu/blob/main/docs/SOUND.md
redm 2mo ago
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).

VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago

What exactly was "bad" about these ads? They're eye catching, and it definitely interested me as a reader. Poor choice of title.

jimt1234 2mo ago
Agreed. I remember those ads, and I kinda liked them. They had personality. The other PC ads were just tech specs - boring.
cm2012 2mo ago
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.
- spacedcowboy 2mo ago
  Yep, I’m generally not an advert person, but even I remember the cow adverts in the otherwise staid PCW mag. I think the only test of advertising is if it works. This seems to have worked on me…

Aeroi 2mo ago

I wrote a tweet a few months ago about how Gateway cow branding would crush it in 2026. those ads are amazing.

incanus77 2mo ago

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.

bluedino 2mo ago
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.
dosman33 2mo ago
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.

geophile 2mo ago

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.

rl3 2mo ago

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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35027437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35027437

a-dub 2mo ago

ahh yes, the early 90s. computer shopper, datanet, pc magazine, a $59 seller's permit from the state of california that came with a magic number that would make distributors sell to you at cost for both computer and bike parts, automated touch tone fax back information systems, the absolute cheapest xt clone that could be assembled from parts from the computer shopper, ups cash on delivery, genie, prodigy, the bbs scene, the dreaded "rma number" and the subsequent wait, searching the space of physical card positions, jumper settings and tsr drivers that would allow the mouse, the soundcard and the game to all work at the same time, the borland compiler suite, mark williams coherent, os/2 2.0, trumpet winsock, slackware linux floppies... not a bad time to be a kid.

bluedino 2mo ago
Borrowed my mothers credit card to buy a modem and sound card from Surplus Software, it was like a miracle when an Airborne Express van showed up the next day with my goods.

imthenitto 2mo ago

[flagged]

dosman33 2mo ago

These old ads are great, really takes me back to that era. In the mid to late 1990's I was a pimply faced youth in community college and picked up a part time job doing "PC repair". I couldn't put my finger on it, but the outfit carried itself like it was a major corporation despite being a small office, it was called TSS (Technology Service Solutions). The majority of the other guys were always working in the field so I wouldn't get to know them until many months later. When I got my first paycheck (physical paper), it said IBM on it. I asked my boss why this was and he nonchalantly said "we just use IBM's payroll system". I was very confused but didn't ask any further questions. What I came to learn later was that TSS was IBM's PC service division which it had sold off to Kodak just a few years prior. I spent most of my time doing contracted in-home PC repair for all the major PC brands of the era, including Gateway. I'd get a service call (on a RIM bullfrog two-way pager), call the customer and tell them "Hi, I'm with <major brand computer>, give me directions to your house and I'll fix your system". Most of the consumer PC manufacturers were unequipped to provide any kind of in-field repair service on their products, so they hired TSS for this. If you bought any kind of extended warranty on your PC then you were paying for TSS to show up on-site at your home to fix it. Apparently this was better than regional central repair hubs. Let me tell you, there were some seriously crazy stories from the front line. Most of our work was through Sears for Packard Bell (cheapest machines sell higher volume and therefore require the most service, not even counting for PB's lower quality). We serviced Acer, Sony Vaio, Gateway, Dell, and other brands, and did other point-of-sale and other contract work. I remember servicing the Gateway Destination system - that 35" CRT was huge for even a TV at that time. But being up close I realized it actually kinda sucked to use as a computer monitor. People tried to set them up in their living rooms, so imagine using your computer in the living room instead of an office, and required sitting next to the 35" display meant you saw the CRT up close which just meant the low resolution was blown up larger and you could see the physically larger pixels up close. So yea, showing up to peoples houses meant going to a lot of random peoples houses which was mostly fine, but occasionally terrible. I had multiple instances of working on computers in a house having brownouts. "So wait, the computer reboots when the lights in the house flicker? And dispatch has sent me out with a new display for you... yea, you're gonna have to get the power company out here...". One time, I was sent to a house that was barely a shack in the woods. Main room had a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. That call in particular stands out in my mind, nice people, a 70 year skinny old dude in overalls and a 400' bearded lady in a shack. I couldn't do anything to make their Gatway machine work better as it was the power lines (lightbulb was visibly flickering the whole time I was there, that poor PC never stood a chance), so I showed her how to play her music CD's in PC (between power sags that crashed the machine) and she was tickled pink. One of my trainers had a couple horror stories: one dudes house was an underground bunker. My coworker was sent to replace a modem. After, the client couldn't find his Solitaire on his desktop, so he locked the door and demanded my coworker fix his Solitaire game before he could leave. My coworker obviously had nothing to do with that issue, but he recreated the shortcut to the desktop and was set free. Eventually I jumped ship from TSS to IBM proper, it was a fun adventure. But that year and a half slinging in-home service calls in the evenings was an interesting time.

jonhohle 2mo ago

Gateway 2000 (and subsequently Gateway) was one of my favorite of brands. It was like the Bikes Direct of PC brands - the components you care about on a frame that you don’t.

fenestella 2mo ago

The cow-print branding was a masterclass in building an approachable identity for a commodity business, but these specific spreads really highlight how weird 90s tech marketing was. I'd forgotten they tried to lean so hard into the 'cowboy' persona for a PC builder. It's wild to see how much margin they must have had to afford these multi-page glossy inserts in every issue of PC Magazine.

TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
It wasn't just PC Magazine, it was every PC magazine. They must have negotiated some hefty discounts, because page rates were astronomical. Even so - the incredible thing about PC magazines was that they were read by people who wanted to buy PCs, so the ROI on that kind of niche targeted ad spend was always worthy.

SalaevAl 2mo ago

This brings back memories. In my city, there were no computers for sale in regular stores in the early 90s. My first computer was a second-hand ZX Spectrum. I still remember how excited I was when I finally got one.

gidellav 2mo ago

Honestly it's better to have bad but fun ads than those sterile corporate design used nowadays.

userbinator 2mo ago

I seem to remember computer ads in 90s had lots of rural and farming-related elements; I wonder if that was an attempt to appeal to the part of the population that probably had the least idea what a computer was. At that time I also recall some jokes about "the farmer in the Dell".

EvanAnderson 2mo ago
Another sizeable PC vendor, Midwest Micro (also traded under the name Systemax), was headquartered near the sub-1,000 population town of Fletcher, OH (out amidst farm fields). I can't say I remember their ads specifically, but I could see rural theming being a thing with them.

mixmastamyk 2mo ago

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. :-/

runamuck 2mo ago

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."

zabzonk 2mo ago

LTT did a very funny video on bad tech ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXVeSJ1WAt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXVeSJ1WAt0

ratana 2mo ago

I didn't have a Gateway 2000, but my friend did, and it came with an amazing keyboard with programmable macros. I was able to get one of those and used it for a few years, and never understood why such a thing wasn't more common.

duxup 2mo ago
That was the Gateway AnyKey keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_AnyKey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_AnyKey
dolmen 2mo ago
I kept using the AnyKey keyboard long after I replaced my P5-90 with a newer home-assembled Celeron.

srj 2mo ago

I still have my foam gateway cow!

EvanAnderson 2mo ago
I had a Customer who bought tons of Gateway PCs. They had a "pasture" cubicle full of foam cows. It was quite a sight. A friend of mine had a Gateway PC at home (the first Pentium Pro I ever saw-- his stepfather splurged on it). The dog got ahold of the foam cow and tore a leg off, so my friend used markers to draw on "gore". I'll never forget the maimed Gateway cow.