Some of the final remnants of Gateway are leaving the Sioux City area.
Ted Waitt and Mike Hammond started the Gateway computer company in a northwest Iowa farmhouse back in 1985. By the late 1990s, Gateway employed over 6000 in the Sioux City metro, but Waitt moved the company’s corporate headquarters to California in 2001.
MPC, an Idaho company that bought part of Gateway in the fall of 2007, announced Monday that the final 50 workers in North Sioux City have been let go. The Idaho company filed for bankruptcy in November.
A Taiwan-based company called Acer owns what remains of Gateway computers and has just a handful of employees in North Sioux City. Gateway computers are sold in retail stores, but you can’t buy one on-line anymore — and the computers are no longer made in the U.S.A.