
Michael D. Hammond, Co-Founder of Gateway, Is Dead at 53 - doppp
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/technology/michael-d-hammond-co-founder-of-gateway-is-dead-at-53.html
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chipotle_coyote
My 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.

~~~
test_plan
I still have my 1989 motherboard-- 386, 1 megabyte of RAM, 80MB hard drive...
I remember booting it up for the first time and DOS reporting only 640K of
memory and calling them up to wonder where the rest of it went. They were very
nice about explaining it to me over the phone.

(...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!)

~~~
lotharbot
My dad bought a 386 DX-20, 4 MB of RAM, 80 MB hard drive, from the original
"Computers from Iowa?" ad in PC Magazine. I finally sent it to the recyclers
about a year and a half ago. (The only old computer I kept was a TRS-80 model
1 level 2.)

Gateway 2000 was such a great company in that era.

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crabasa
My 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
My 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
Ditto. 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.

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strictnein
Actually 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.

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mschaef
I'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.

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wyclif
His wife died recently. I wonder how much that had to do with this sad news.

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at-fates-hands
I 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.

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yuhong
It 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
It'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.

~~~
noir_lord
I 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.

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wittekm
His poor kids - their mother died 4 to 5 months ago. :(

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hipsterrific
My 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.

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agumonkey
Since 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

~~~
tajen
I also remember fantasizing a lot on the Gateway2000, or actually any computer
that ran Win95. I was stuck with an Amstrad 8086, DOS and GW-Basic. Pretty
much no games. Fantasizing was 50% of my education to IT ;)

~~~
agumonkey
I like frugal but I have to admit... 8086 is tough.

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LordKano
I'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.

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intrasight
Never bought one of 'em, but Rest In Peace Mr Hammond.

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rbanffy
A 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".

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contingencies
Does 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.

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bad_user
My 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.

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adventured
> 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
Yes 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.

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agumonkey
I 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 ?

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ghaff
There 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.)

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rmason
Michigan'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)

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rosege
I 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

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webwanderings
I posted this one day ago and it was buried. How strange!

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melling
This 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=byPo...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=iphone%206s%20review&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story)

This story was posted 3 times:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Gateway%20founder&sort=byPopul...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Gateway%20founder&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story)

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Albright
He will be buried in a cowprint-patterend coffin.

…sorry.

