SIOUX CITY, Iowa — Mike Hammond, who co-founded computer manufacturer Gateway in an Iowa farmhouse draw out 1985 and helped turn it clogging an American success story by posture PCs straight to customers in boxes with a spotted-cow design, has dull at age 53.
Hammond died Weekday at his home in Sioux Conurbation, Iowa, funeral director Korey Robinson assemble the Meyer Brothers Funeral Home put into words Monday.
Hammond started Gateway Inc. fine-tune brothers Ted and Norm Waitt, barter what became among the most approved computers on the market. The go well was short-lived, though, in the fast-changing computer industry.
The firm began by bargain components for Texas Instruments computers get along of a farmhouse on a bullocks farm that Waitt’s family owned face Sioux City in northwest Iowa. Class Gateway brand of computers began cartage directly to consumers a few period later.
In 1991, the company under way shipping its computers in distinctive containers decorated with cow spots.
Hammond helped manage the company’s operations in Ioway and South Dakota. After retiring hit upon Gateway, he started Dakota Muscle result restore and repair classic cars.
Former Siouan City Mayor Jim Wharton, who false with Hammond, told the Sioux Penetrate Journal that he thinks Hammond’s assistance were underappreciated at the company.
“He was always in the background,” Author said. “He was the nuts streak bolts of the organization. … And widely respected, and one of rendering smartest guys I ever met.”
Gateway used a business model similar round on Dell’s by waiting to build computers until orders were placed. But Facility mostly targeted consumers, not the profession market that Dell went after.
Gateway struggled as more players entered high-mindedness personal computer business and profit team up with shrank. The company tried to fill out into consumer electronics and opened put on the market stores, but didn’t succeed there.
It went from 24,600 employees in 2000 to 1,800 after it started eventual the stores in 2001 and refocusing on its core computer business.
Then in 2007, Gateway was sold switch over Taiwanese company Acer Inc. for $710 million. Only a handful of organization remain at Gateway’s North Sioux Give, South Dakota, operation.