This brings me back to when I was shopping for my college computer. I used to pour through Computer Shopper magazine, totally captivated by the ads from (Midwest?) Micron, Gateway 2000, etc.<p>I ended up with a Gateway 2000 486-25 DX, 4 MB of RAM, 83 MB HDD, 14" SVGA monitor, and Windows 3.1(?), an AnyKey keyboard, and mouse for (IIRC) $3100. And the salesman was named Tom Reibur (I may be misspelling his last name). It was delivered in several large cow-themed boxes by a FedEx delivery van with a woman driver.<p>Guess my first serious computer left an impression :)
My first PC was a Micron. I don't remember the specs at this point but the machine was fast, every component in it was well-chosen and standard, and the case was roomy and easy enough to get into that I was still using it long after swapping out all of the original components.<p>The best thing about Micron, though, was the support. Micron had no Level 1 "techs" reading replies from a script on staff, no annoying phone trees to navigate, and no obnoxiously long hold times. You'd just call and within a few rings be speaking directly to a Level 2 or 3 tech who knew both hardware and Windows troubleshooting and treated you as a peer. Discovering how aggressively awful support from most tech companies is after working with Micron was disheartening.
> <i>Microsoft was about to release Windows 95, which everyone knew was going to require 8 megabytes of RAM to run reasonably, 16 megabytes of RAM to run well, and power users were going to want 32.</i><p>And here we are, 25 years later, doing mostly the same on our PCs (the typical desktop applications are the same today as they were then, ok, some of them now run in a browser, and instead of WinAmp playing your local MP3 files you have Spotify streaming from the cloud), but requiring 1024 times more memory to do it - 8 GB bare minimum, 16 GB ok, 32 GB for power users!
I currently work for Micron as a 25 year old. I honestly had no idea Micron used to make computers until I saw a Linux Tech Tips video where they made a "sleeper PC" using an old Micron case from the 90s.<p>This article was a good summary of what I have understood to be Micron's history. Thanks for sharing.
I flopped at interview at Micron PC (MPC) around 2005 maybe? An interviewer asked me who their main customer was and I had absolutely no idea. Turned out that it was the government.<p>I was so idealistic at the time that I was thinking about stuff like NAND flash memory and FPGAs and affordable solar panels and multicore CPUs. Which were ideas being explored by Micron. But MPC's business was supplying rudimentary computers for office use. That was a solved problem by the late 90s so there wasn't anywhere for the market to go except a race to the bottom.<p>On a side note, many techies in southern Idaho felt that Micron and HP had monopolized the local tech scene through tax waivers and hiring up talent, barring entry to startups until around 2015. Today there's an eerie feeling that it's all happening too quickly and we'll go the way of Austin as thousands of economic and climate refugees flock here from other states, paving all of the farms for subdivisions and cutting down all of the trees for 3 story apartments. Now a home that was $150k in 2010 goes for half a million dollars while wages for average working people still hover in the $40-60k range, so the locals are getting forced out just like everywhere else.
Not enough history about Micron, the company. The founder sold the exclusive potatoes for McDonald's French fries! He literally went from chips to chips.
I miss Micron computers, they were clean and click with black cases... It was so easy to work on them because the cases were well designed and durable. Most of the parts in Microns i recall were easily swappable, which was great for troubleshooting. Back then the top of the line desktops were around $2-4k each, I worked in a university library that bought 100 of them and I was a help desk/support tech back around 1995... The job was quite easy, except for working with printers. Now, you couldn't convince me to do PC support if you held a gun to my head. :/<p>I think a lot of those people went to work for Dell. Unfortunately they lost the plot in making too many fail-prone things as integrated components.
Micron Computers had a fantastic website, with a no-frills configurator that let you customize nearly every component. They also offered solid upgrades to sound and video cards, and even Trinitron monitors.<p>They were like an unpretentious Falcon Northwest.
My ex and I had one of those. I think it might have been the last PC we bought without a video card... worked well (for its time), actually.<p>I miss the days when there were more vendors and Computer Shopper was enormous. Ah well.
We had a Micron growing up, it was a pentium 90, it had one of those early plexus cd burners that had that plastic caddy you put the cds into, I spent such a long time getting my boot disk to work and run wing commander 3 well.<p>Good times.