Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
1. Gunmen Kill 12, Wound 7 At French Magazine HQ
2. Confirmed Dead In Shooting at Oregon's Umpqua Community College
3. Officer Not Charged In Michael Brown Shooting
4. Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour
5. How To Execute People In the 21st Century
Excellent work, Slashdot.