A retired business school professor passed on a well preserved Gateway 2000 486 system in an original configuration, which would have been a $3,000 computer when it was sold exactly 30 years ago in September 1993 (there are date stickers on all the components, making this easy to pin down). That’s more than $6,300 in today’s money when adjusted for inflation. With 16MB of RAM, a 66Mhz DX2 processor, Vesa local bus graphics, and a massive 420MB hard disk drive it was top of the range for mainstream PCs, although the first Pentium powered models had launched a few months earlier. It’s in a full sized desktop case with Gateway’s classic curved front and round buttons, already a little old fashioned as the market was shifting to smaller desktop and minitower cases.
You can see it advertised here, https://archive.org/details/pc-computing-magazine-v6i9/page/n61/mode/2up as Gateway’s flagship model. The advertisement is remarkably text heavy.
In those days, Gateway and Dell were neck and neck as leading mail order providers of solid but well priced custom built PCs to businesses and upper middle class families. Computers and monitors arrived in boxes with bold cow-style spots, celebrating Gateway’s origins in Sioux City, Iowa where the company was originally based in a “dilapidated cattle brokerage” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway,_Inc). A computer exactly like this was still in use in the Real Estate center of Penn’s Wharton school when I designed a database application for them in summer 1996, though as newer models had come in over the next three years it had been passed down to Gertrude the receptionist. To support the new system I upgraded it to Windows 95 which it ran tolerably.
To purchase a PC in 1993 you had to know what all that jargon meant, otherwise you’d have no idea if it was the right configuration for you and if it was a good deal vs. options from hundreds of other brands. Buying a PC basically involved picking a long list of standard components which the company would screw together and set up for you. Standard configurations changed month to month, even from the same company. The owner had added the optional model (card on the left) for an extra $200, allowing for dial up Internet access and the sending of faxes.
Here’s what it looked like when it arrived, with a lot of accumulated dust which, among other things, was preventing the CD-ROM tray from closing properly.
After cleaning everything worked great, but the included single speed CD-ROM drive hooked up to the SoundBlaster 16 sound card proved too limiting for the 1993-5 Windows 3.1 multimedia experience that the machine would otherwise have excelled at. With the huge storage capacity of CD-ROM, videogame designers and multimedia producers were very excited about the potential of putting full motion video into everything. Alas, playing to play it back properly at full screen size needs at least a double speed CD-ROM, which was available in 1993 but not fitted by Gateway as standard until later in the year. Fortunately we had a slightly older 486 computer from 1992 upgraded with a 4X CD-ROM (19994) salvaged from UWM Surplus. I swapped them over and verified both systems worked. The hard drive was a time capsule with a selection of mid-1990s applications installed, including the various utilities like Trumpet Winsock needed to connect to the Internet before those capabilities were integrated into Windows 95.
Alas, just as I was ready to put the cover back on and move the system off my crowded little workbench it abruptly started to hang every time I tried to launch Windows. Hours of historical reenactment of the huge frustrations of multimedia PC ownership by changing BIOS settings, removing things from CONFIG.SYS, running Norton Disk Doctor, etc. revealed that the problem was corruption of several directories, including many of the files in the Windows directory. I ordered a replacement hard drive, which worked, but tests suggested that the original drive was also fine and just the file information had been corrupted in the file allocation tables DOS uses to track what is where on a disk. Norton Disk Doctor helped make the directories readable again, but several vital files were unusable. Dusting off my Windows 3.1 floppy disks to reinstall Windows and downloading the appropriate graphics drivers eventually worked at fixing Windows without wiping the whole drive clean and losing the historical mix of period software.
I think what had gone wrong relates to the battery used to preserve system information while the computer was turned off. This failed decades ago, and those batteries (from Madison-based Rayovac) are no longer produced. The replacement I rigged up with an AA battery holder ordered from Amazon, turned out not to be working because the new battery holder was faulty. That’s a sad comparison between modern equipment and the quality and durability of the thirty year old Gateway, but fortunately it was a four pack, and the next one did work. But in the meantime the computer was setting its configuration somewhat randomly every time it was turned on, and on one occasion it picked settings that pushed the hard drive controller too fast and corrupted part of the disk. Fate may yet prove me wrong, but other than that the drive itself and every part of the computer still seem to be working fine, validating Gateway 2000’s reputation for picking quality components.
Here is it set up in its new home, paired with its original keyboard and some Gateway branded speakers I’d earlier found in UWM Surplus.
The Gateway “Crystalscan” 15 inch monitor it came with is smaller and fuzzier than the beautiful 17 inch model I was using previously, but gives a much better idea of what ordinary computer users were dealing with in the period.
Also note the extra keys on this special “Anykey” keyboard, a Gateway 2000 signature in the period. To the left there are function keys in two rows, as on the original PC, as well as in the usual place above the number keys. There are diagonal keys as well as the usual up, down, left, and right arrows. In the top right, an extra block of keys records macro sequences of key presses into a small memory built into the keyboard itself. A useful feature in the days of DOS, less so with the shift to Windows.
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