But you'd notice Gateway 2000. Right beside the highway, just outside of town, stand a couple of two-story buildings with white, ribbed metal walls, like utilitarian trailer homes. The buildings are gigantic, a quarter-mile long, and next to them is a parking lot the size of an airfield. Even at midnight, there are lights burning and big rigs waiting at the loading dock with their engines idling, exhausts steaming in the frigid air. Most people know Gateway from its distinctive, lavish, eight-page ads that run in half a dozen computer magazines.
Every ad tells a wacky story.
The company operates in a defiantly personal, down-home style, no different from when it started out eight years ago in a red barn on the Waitt family's cattle ranch. The Gateway mascot is a cow. Gateway systems are shipped in boxes that are mottled black and white - like Holsteins. Even the big, modern, main building at Gateway is painted like a cow. But the gross revenues are hardly bovine.