Michael D. Hammond, Co-Founder of Gateway, Is Dead at 53
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
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.
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.
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?"
Heh. Good times. =)
ps: some facts I didn't understand before http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2386110 , sad end anyway.
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.
(...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!)
Gateway 2000 was such a great company in that era.
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.
Thanks Mr. Hammond. Godspeed. =)
This was actually a very big deal then.
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.
Luckily, Microsoft Encarta and Microsoft Dinosaurs, which came with bundled with my Gateway 2000, ran fine.
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.
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.
Sounds like he was still doing fine though with his muscle car business: http://www.dakotamuscle.com/index.html
Looks like they do some cool stuff.
It's different if you want a gamer box.
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.
All that to say, I miss that old Gateway PC.
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 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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…sorry.