Gateway 2000's hilariously bad ads in the 90s (Part II)
buttondown.com52 points by rfarley04 4 hours ago
52 points by rfarley04 4 hours 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=PA...
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).
I was very young and I tried to upgrade the RAM on our gateway computer. I used the wrong type of RAM and fried (or broke) the motherboard. When I talked to gateway support, I think the person on the other end could tell what happened but took pity on me and allowed us to get a new motherboard under warranty. I had completely forgot that story until your comment here, thanks for the reminder on why I double check all the specs before rummaging around in there.
For DOS, your choices are basically DJGPP C compiler, or using the HXDOS DOS extender. But how well would Cave Story work on 50MHz?
> 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.
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-p...
> 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."
There's actually a mortgage company that does worse; They call it the 'People Promise', and it sounds like a bonus, but;
1. It's actually a loan.
2. If you leave or are terminated at any point for the period, you have to pay back the ENTIRE loan amount.
3. Because it's a loan, if you -do- survive employment through the term, guess what, you now have to pay tax on the 'forgiven loan'.
4. If you don't take it, you don't get hired.
Number 3 sounds like nothing out of the ordinary? Any bonus you get from an employer, granted or otherwise, has to be taxed at some point. This just sounds like a weird signing bonus.
No, you can’t force people to continue working at your company by contract.
These agreements work like signing bonuses. The compensation is given up front, but if you leave before N months then you need to return the compensation or some times a pro-rated version of it.
Usually signing bonuses are "pay back all or a pro-rated percentage if you leave before [date]"
Sure, but that's just lending you a computer at that point, unless they expect you to cover the depreciation cost or something when returning it.
Gateway was located in Sioux City, IA before they moved to South Dakota in 1990: https://medium.com/@madmedic11671/behind-the-spots-the-story...
Sioux City is near a tripoint where Iowa, South Dakota, and Nebraska located in the Missouri River floodplain so it is natural they would have operations in two states at some point in its history. I just drove through here and spent a weekend in the area, Ponca State Park (NE) is lovely!
It is effectively the same city in three states, but most of it is in Iowa. Of course there are separate entities because it's in different states but if it weren't they would have all combined.
Let’s be clear: they were Lego-ing together parts from China. There were no mass produced PC components in the US by the 90s.
In the UK a typical Gateway 2000 desktop PC came with a Trinitron screen, made by Sony in South Wales.
Their business model for the UK was the same tax scam as Apple, Dell and others. Everything was mail order, operating out of Dublin.
Their products had quality multimedia toys (CD, speakers, decent screen, keyboard with extra programmable keys) combined with decent CPU/RAM/ROM/graphics for the price.
I did support for a small company that bought Gateway (in the UK) and there certainly were no 'Made in USA' labels anywhere.
I really liked their machines and I bought one myself because it had that Trinitron screen at a bargain price. I was very happy with that machine. In the UK they went a bit sour after dropping the '2000' branding with the cow spots.
Their laptops were not as successful as their desktop machines, where they never quite managed to compete in either the 'value for money' or 'nice to have' sectors. Dell, Toshiba and even Compaq had preferable laptops.
Their success in the UK was the Dell model (Ireland tax fiddle), except they didn't make you wait weeks for your machine (like Dell did, with it having to be 'built to order').
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.
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.
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…
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:
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.
I wrote a tweet a few months ago about how Gateway cow branding would crush it in 2026. those ads are amazing.
“These are the worst ads I’ve ever seen.”
“But you have seen them.”
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.
What exactly was "bad" about these ads? They're eye catching, and it definitely interested me as a reader.
Poor choice of title.
Agreed. I remember those ads, and I kinda liked them. They had personality. The other PC ads were just tech specs - boring.
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.
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-...
I love that these ads had (cornball) personality.
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.
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.
4DX266 isn't it? I had that exact spec as a kid, still remember the big cow patterned boxes it came in
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.
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.
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