CDRLabs.com

The banding together of Taiwan-based personal-computer maker Acer Inc. and Gateway Inc. of the U.S. underlines how crucial scale is in the consolidating global personal-computer market, where margins are thin and competition is increasing.

Acer's latest push into the U.S. also marks a new stage in one of the PC industry's biggest turnaround stories.

Acer yesterday announced its $710 million acquisition of Irvine, Calif.-based Gateway, vaulting the combined company into the No. 3 spot in global PC-market share by unit shipments. The new Acer would supplant China's Lenovo Group Ltd., which rose to the third spot in the industry two ...

Anyone remember when Gateway was the biggest name in PC's? When I was in college, that's all we ordered at work. Dell wasn't even a blip on the radar at that time.

Ian wrote:Anyone remember when Gateway was the biggest name in PC's? When I was in college, that's all we ordered at work. Dell wasn't even a blip on the radar at that time.

Yeah, I remember when Gateway was all the rave, with their cow skin patterened boxes and all.

Lately, I haven't heard much of anything about Gateway. I guess Dell just blew them out of the water with marketing, pricing and customization options?

I still have the Gateway2000 t-shirt !

Wesociety wrote:

Ian wrote:Anyone remember when Gateway was the biggest name in PC's? When I was in college, that's all we ordered at work. Dell wasn't even a blip on the radar at that time.

Yeah, I remember when Gateway was all the rave, with their cow skin patterened boxes and all.

Lately, I haven't heard much of anything about Gateway. I guess Dell just blew them out of the water with marketing, pricing and customization options?

Gateway's eMachines arm is doing better for them than Gateway is, I believe. To the point where a number of Gateway boxes look remarkably similar to the eMachines models. I think they're doing okay on laptop sales, and their new 24" LCD made some waves this past year, but they still aren't the powerhouse they once were.

Gateway was my first PC. A 486DX2/50 in the white desktop profile with a 14" monitor. Price was ~$2400 and I think it came with a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sound card to boot. While I used PC's at school before then, I was a Commodore hold out at home with my external US Robotics Dual Standard modem! Oh yeah, I had to buy a serial port card with 16550AFN UART's for the PC so the buffers wouldn't overrun.

The nice thing about Gateway in the early days was that they would try to diagnosis your problem over the phone. If you felt comfortable they would wait on the phone while you played around inside the PC trying things. They would ship you 3.5" floppies, IDE controller cards, hard drives, ect. to replace components and you would just ship back the old components. It was part of your warranty. You never had to take the PC in if you knew what you were doing. That's what made them unique.

Jim wrote:...They would ship you 3.5" floppies, IDE controller cards, hard drives, ect. to replace components and you would just ship back the old components. It was part of your warranty. You never had to take the PC in if you knew what you were doing. That's what made them unique.

That's cool. How all warranty's should be.

lol.. the first PC I bought myself was an Acer. I think it was a whopping 33Mhz.

I've been cleaning out the tech closet recently and stumbled across the old hard drive from my Gateway mentioned above. Western Digital Caviar 2200 (WDAC2200-50F) Built Jul 1992. 212.6 MB.

Just for fun I tried hooking it up to my Bytecc USB-IDE adapter. WindowsXP would recognize it, but I couldn't access it at all.