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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

> One of the interesting things is that Dell was really the only retailer with significant online sales at the time,

I thought gateway 2000 was a big online retailer around that time. In fact I thought it was them more than Dell that lead the online push.

I guess I’m misremembering as it was 25 years ago.

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Both started their online stores in 1996. Dell's whole business model, though, was cutting down on inventory (JIT/Lean style) and intermediaries. Dell didn't sell through big box stores and others like Gateway and the rest did.

Gateway tried to expand by opening its own stores, but ultimately closed them all because they lost money.

Thus when Apple opened its own store it was seen as a desperate gamble (perhaps it was? I no longer remember) and destined to fail.

I was thinking the same thing, as we got a 486 dx2 66 from gateway 2000, complete with a faulty quad speed cd writer, ms office and encarta. And of course… the cow box. But this was ordered over the telephone from adverts I kept up to date with in computer magazines and the moment the dx2 66 was the best price (the 100 was the silly price one) I got my parents to pull the trigger and buy it. Happy times circa 1993.

Wow, a CD writer at the time a 486 was still a reasonable proposition must have cost more than the machine itself!? We had one of the earliest CD writers in the UK, paired with a Pentium with MMX, and the writer price was still comparable to the rest of the machine put together!

Yes! I remember a lot of friends getting the same cow box we did ;) I conflate things and timelines though.

Gateway was everyone’s computer at that time. All my friends and family had Gateway. Dell blossomed later.

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