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Gateway Computer Co-Founder Mike Hammond Dead At 53 (siouxlandnews.com)
damn_registrars writes: Mike Hammond, one of the three men who co-founded Gateway Computer, died over the weekend at the age of 53. Gateway started in an Iowa farmhouse in 1985 and shipped PCs straight to customers in boxes with a spotted-cow design. After retiring from Gateway, Hammond started Dakota Muscle to restore and repair classic cars.
Innovation 1: Cow-spotted boxes.
Innovation 2: Hidden cost reductions - getting Gateway boxes with "missing" SIMM slots, expansion card slots, etc.. I think that they were the first to quietly remove features that people took for granted - until they weren't there when you went to upgrade.
Gateway is for cows! MOO go the cows! You cows!
I feel bad because he died, but I also feel good because I outlived him.
I mean, it's better that I read about his death than him reading about mine, right?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
And they are willing to kill in order to brig about our death.
He made computers cheaper so IBM declared a fatwa against him. They finally were able to get their ass assisiniies into his ouse.
They truly are the party of death.
They hated him for making computers cheaper. They wanted him to die.
it had a 400Mhz Celeron CPU, 32 megs ram and win98 it is also the PC that i did my first Linux install and learned to use Linux on
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
First, my condolences to his family.
I worked at the North Sioux City facility from late 1990 to mid-96. It was my first full-time job after college. I started in manufacturing for about 6 months, then moved to tech support for a number of years before going to a couple of other places in the company.
It was an interesting place to work and I have a lot of memories of working there. At first, the parking lot was still gravel and didn't get paved until the new manufacturing building was finished. Up until then, the existing building had at least 2, maybe 3 additions put on it. They had a monthly bonus program. It wasn't that much, but it seemed to give everybody an extra motivation to do better, that they had some skin in the game. I don't mean just push more systems out the door, although that was part of it, of course. But just to do their jobs better because it could affect the bottom line. The parking lot of actually a bit of a point of pride, i.e if we had a choice between the two, we would rather have a bigger monthly bonus over a paved parking lot. There was a story that Ted Waitt wanted to leave his spot gravel, but it was too much of a pain so they didn't. Maybe true, maybe not. I never interacted with him or his brother, although I did see them many times in the early days. Not so much later on.
There was also a sense of purpose in the first few years I was there. When I worked tech support (especially consumer before going to corporate support), I remember talking to people who was happy to be able to afford a computer to help them run their small businesses that they would not otherwise have been able to buy.
The cow spotted boxes. Yeah, at first, I remember thinking that it was dumb. It got people's attention and I talked to people who had bought from them after seeing many deliveries in their neighborhoods. I remember seeing all of our competitors with the ads in Computer Shopper. Back then, Computer Shopper was like the Montgomery Wards catalog for geeks. Talk about dating myself. -sigh- Over time, the number of competitors dwindled. I remember the owner of at least one of them saying that he was going to bury Gateway 2000. That business closed a couple of years later.
I remember when I started, working with ESDI drives, 5 1/2 floppy drives, Windows 3.0 (oh, the horror), motherboards with DIPP memory (up to 72 DIPP chips of horror for a whopping 8 meg of ram). I also remember in the early days, having production waiting on a shipment of something (motherboard, hard drives, etc.) to land at the Sioux City airport so that it could be trucked to North Sioux City. Talk about "Just in time inventory." I think that was the first time I heard that term and that was probably 1991.
Others have commented about failure rate of components. Yeah, I remember some of that. Not to excuse the problems inflicted on customers, but that was the very early days of WD IDE hard drives. I'm not sure if the first ones were 20 MB or 40 MB. Some of the boards (sound cards especially come to mind) had different revisions that just showed up with little, if any, documentation. Drivers... yeah... drivers were problematic. Motherboard BIOSes. This was before they were flashable and chips that were socketed (if you were lucky), but an upgraded BIOS meant swapping out the whole motherboard.
The company kept growing and the quality of some people definitely went down along with the sense of purpose. On the other hand, the manufacturing line had a number of improvements that did raise the overall quality. I think the Waitts (directly or indirectly) made some poor choices of hiring some key people to help manage the growth. I remember a few people from some big name companies at the time (HP, maybe... definitely one from Compaq who came and left). That's not to say that all of them were bad, it's just the bad ones that stick in my memory. There were also consultants, like Ernst & Young. They would bring in a team consisting of some very junior people who we
....just bought the farm.
That gateway went from 'Awesome' to 'T3h sUx'. Gateway 2000 from the late 80s (when I got mine) through the mid 90s was awesome. Then they rebranded, teamed up with Microsoft, tried to open the 'Gateway Stores' to cut out middlemen and generally lost their way.
That said, RIP Mike Hammond. Glad you got to spend your money doing something else you were passionate about (cars).
Abortion? Death panels? Murders committed by illegal immigrants in sanctuary cities? Murders by released convicts?
Which is the party of death? I thought Republicans were pro life.
Thanks for the recollections, Mine are more tangental as I just helped a few friends who had Gateway computers but I don't think I ever owned one directly... I did have a friend who worked for a time at a Gateway store. I was always sad they vanished as they seemed to be one of the better companies, sadly as you noted beset by management problems.
Also sad he died so young.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Acer owns the brand for the past several years and the computers are actually pretty good.
The laptops are very affordable, it's their value brand, with Acer the high value brand.
Not great, but not terrible, either.
Kriston
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Excellent work, Slashdot.
I remember when they bought Commodore and Amiga from Escom in 1997. The Amiga scene went "well, now what?" and Gateway's response was "people still use these crappy machines?" Good times!
I'm betting the cause of death was bad caps/capacitor plague...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Can I assume he will buried in a cow box?
Get a room you two.
Back in the day, computers were EXPENSIVE. Companies like Gateway and Packard Bell allowed people to buy cheaper computers. They weren't as great as the real-deal IBM PC or high-end Dell computers, but they ran the same programs and opened the door for many of us. One of the times we can actually celebrate capitalism helping people.
What are you talking about? The man was tiny! Look how small he is compared to the scissors he is holding.
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