alt Hacker News> 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.
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> 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."
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!
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.
> We got a Pentium III 550 MHz screamer
Super nice
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...