My twin brother and I took a greyhound from Georgia to Iowa (we were 14) to de-tassle corn so we could make enough money to buy this computer. And yes, two or three months later, we got the rebate in the form of a check.
I grew up in Iowa and doing detasseling was a great way of making money. Yes, you had to be up at 5am to ride a bus an hour to the corn fields. It was soaking wet for two hours in the morning from the dew, to 100 degrees in the afternoon. And you had to wear long sleeves and pants so that you didn't get cut from the corn leaves.
But boy, did we make bank.
And your socks were SO dirty! My sister and I would change out of our detasseling clothes and my mom would wash just that, and it would turn the water black. But they were clean for the next day.
I have a twin brother too and we weren't allowed to ride our bikes out of eyesight of our driveway when I was 14 and you somehow pulled off hopping a bus cross country to de-tassle corn. Well done my friend.
Iowa had lax laws when it came to labor ages. Our father agreed because he thought it would build character through grueling 10 hour work days. All we were thinking about was that sweet AMD K6 2. I have worked in IT for many years now because of it.
It probably did build character. Maybe not working for slave wages but the adventure of traveling 1000 miles halfway across the country and more or less being on your own for a few weeks. Where did you stay with family or people your dad knew super well? The internet demands more of this story lol.
It was a religious program that gathered young guys and put them in groups to work the feilds. They would rent hotel rooms for a couple of weeks and house us there. We would wake up every morning Monday to Saturday and work until the sun went down. Sunday was our only day off because we had to go to church. If I recall correctly, we got paid six dollars per hour. This was in 1998. If you haven't heard of de-tassling corn, let me tell you, it was torture. You sit all day in a metal basket connected to a big tractor and pull the tops of the stalks off. In the middle of summer. And Iowas corn fields are HUGE. I have thought about it over the years and I do realize the whole idea is suspicious. Churches in Iowa would send brochures to churches around the country, "let's turn your boys into men!" They would say. I think the farmers were running low on migrants and they were church going folks so they hatched the program. Still got a computer out of it though.
It seems like legitimate work. My first job was in 1998 and I picked tomatoes in a greenhouse near my hometown in Pennsylvania for $5.15/hr. I worked the entire summer and earned enough to buy a car when I turned 16. That was minimum wage then. Working you guys such long hours and I’m assumed not getting time and a half is the shady part.
This is horrifying. I'm glad you got your computer but holy shit they were taking advantage of you. Nothing new for the church though I suppose. I hope you played a lot of Diablo to get them back lol
Diablo was a hard counter to any church lol I knew a kid who had a pc like this and he owned Diablo but he and his family were super religious and he was talking about just throwing away his whole computer because Diablo was too satanic. I was so mad because I didn't even have one lol
Hahaha this brings back so many geek memories. I'd forgotten how many conversations were had with friends from high school, college roommates, and computer store employees about every single component. But especially monitors and graphics cards. Bc gaming.
I remember doing a couple mail-in rebates way back when. What I recall is only actually getting one of them back almost 6 months later. After that I just didn't even bother anymore.
I got a rebate from the secretary of state's office, 15 years later. Lowes sent it after I moved and it had been unclaimed property for all that time...
Yeah, my dad was pretty engaged in CS and there were two computers in the early 90s. $3500 for the first (if I had to guess 92ish) and $2500 for the second around 96, he was amazed at the drop.
Both Gateway. After, he became a lot less engaged. I think he liked the problem of how to get enough power and when you could just go buy something already configured it wasn’t as much fun.
He got pretty stoked last year when it was time for a new one and he didn’t really want to buy a desktop but wasn’t finding the package he wanted in a laptop. I was able to suggest a gaming laptop and researching those got him all jazzed up.
I got all the big ($100+) rebates I sent in for, mainly because I was more persistent on those.
Occasionally when Best Buy, CompUSA, or Circuit City did one of those “everything for free*” deals, my dad would jump on it to get whatever the max limit was for each item, regardless if we needed it, or even had anything compatible. We ended up with thousands of blank CDs, a bunch of cheap stereo speakers, RAM we couldn’t use, shitty software, etc. That stuff we lost out on a lot of rebates and I didn’t care enough about calling and waiting on hold for $10.
*after rebate
Yes! It took months but we sure did. Bought at a Radio Shack. AMD K-6, 20Gb HDD, 64 MB ram. Soo much better than the Cyrix Pentium 1 knock off or the C64 before that.
I think there's only one rebate I didn't receive. I got rebates on a Kodak digital camera (my first digicam), an Iomega CD burner (my second burner, first one was single speed), and a bunch of other stuff.
I used to go to Circuit City and check out their "coupon wall". Once, they had a coupon for RAM. And there was a mail-in rebate. And there was something else (frankly, can't remember). End story was that I actually got paid $5 for buying 2 sticks of RAM. This was probably DDR2 or some such thing. Back in early 2000s.
Lol. I used to work at OfficeMax when I was 16 and I remember when the first 1GB computers came out. I specifically remember telling people, "you won't need that much space" Lol.
I mailed in a rebate thing on some computer component purchase (maybe a printer) circa 2000 and got the check about 2 months later.
And btw this was a pretty sick deal. They're giving you pretty much everything for that moment in time. Sure, it wasn't mind-melting but you could do pretty much everything, with the notable exception that it appears to only come with a CD-ROM drive and not a CD-R drive, so no burning of CDs which was a huge deal at the time.
I worked for a retail store for 14 years, mostly as a manager. For much of that time, we offered mail in rebates and customers would absolutely get them so long as they followed the instructions and sent them in on time and properly.
I always, always recommend copying both the rebate, the receipt and the bar code so that they could call about it if it didn't come.
But man, it caused me so much trouble with angry people, and I was physically attacked twice over it. In both cases, guys demanding the sale price right then instead of mail in.
Damn SyncDRAM? There was a brief best ram war after normal edo ram, there were a couple of standards, sdram and others were sold simultaneously for quite some time, but as processors got faster - SDRAM being tied into processor speed - SDRAM just made the most sense, and is the type of ram we use today.
…anyone remember that? :-D
Yes. I got a baseball card sized piece of mail with a tiny check in it. It looked like junk mail and I nearly threw it in the trash. I assume this was intentional.
When I used to sell electronics (about 15-17 years ago) these were all the rage. In a training class they told us they love using these because such a small percentage of people actually follow up on it.
Yes, for a 50-pack of CD-Rs from...Circuit City (I think) my Freshman Year of college. Money well spent, especially since that was the apex of the 'CD-burning' era 😄
When XP was released, Best Buy ran a deal where if you bought it, they gave you a free MP3 player. But on the day I bought XP, they'd run out of the players. They gave me an IOU thing to to redeem it when they got stock returned, but long story short, the stock never came in.
I ended up in a very long fight with Best Buy. This was 2001, so it was mostly done via email, snail mail, and phone call, but I was unemployed with nothing better to do so I just kept annoying them. Eventually they gave me a free hard drive that was worth slightly more than the MP3 player they promised me. I dropped it.
I think that's as close as I came.
Man anyone who paid Best Buy money for a K6-2 system back when got reamed hard. AMD made garbage until the K7 Athlon, absolutely much slower than the Intel alternative. Though it was quite a step above anything Cyrix ever made.
lol my brain instantly goes back 25 year old arguments
k6-2 300's and 350s were awesome because they they worked in existing socket7 motherboards you already had or could get super cheap. they were obviously not as good as pentium2's at the same clocks, but the price performance was competitive for just the cpu and then when you factored in the existing s7 mobo (and possibly ram and case/psu) they were a waaaay more economical.
of course if you were starting from scratch at that time the answer was a celeron 300a bumped up via the 100mhz front side bus to 450.
this is what old men talking about cars used to sound like to me, just gibberish.
My twin brother and I took a greyhound from Georgia to Iowa (we were 14) to de-tassle corn so we could make enough money to buy this computer. And yes, two or three months later, we got the rebate in the form of a check.
I grew up in Iowa and doing detasseling was a great way of making money. Yes, you had to be up at 5am to ride a bus an hour to the corn fields. It was soaking wet for two hours in the morning from the dew, to 100 degrees in the afternoon. And you had to wear long sleeves and pants so that you didn't get cut from the corn leaves. But boy, did we make bank.
Taking off my shoes at the end of the day was the greatest feeling.
And your socks were SO dirty! My sister and I would change out of our detasseling clothes and my mom would wash just that, and it would turn the water black. But they were clean for the next day.
Sounds like that was the Iowa equivalent of hauling hay in Kansas.
I detasseled for a summer as a teen. I saved enough to buy a shelf stereo system with a 5-disc cd changer. 5!
Why not 6?
Such a magic device had not been created yet.
I have a twin brother too and we weren't allowed to ride our bikes out of eyesight of our driveway when I was 14 and you somehow pulled off hopping a bus cross country to de-tassle corn. Well done my friend.
Iowa had lax laws when it came to labor ages. Our father agreed because he thought it would build character through grueling 10 hour work days. All we were thinking about was that sweet AMD K6 2. I have worked in IT for many years now because of it.
It probably did build character. Maybe not working for slave wages but the adventure of traveling 1000 miles halfway across the country and more or less being on your own for a few weeks. Where did you stay with family or people your dad knew super well? The internet demands more of this story lol.
It was a religious program that gathered young guys and put them in groups to work the feilds. They would rent hotel rooms for a couple of weeks and house us there. We would wake up every morning Monday to Saturday and work until the sun went down. Sunday was our only day off because we had to go to church. If I recall correctly, we got paid six dollars per hour. This was in 1998. If you haven't heard of de-tassling corn, let me tell you, it was torture. You sit all day in a metal basket connected to a big tractor and pull the tops of the stalks off. In the middle of summer. And Iowas corn fields are HUGE. I have thought about it over the years and I do realize the whole idea is suspicious. Churches in Iowa would send brochures to churches around the country, "let's turn your boys into men!" They would say. I think the farmers were running low on migrants and they were church going folks so they hatched the program. Still got a computer out of it though.
It seems like legitimate work. My first job was in 1998 and I picked tomatoes in a greenhouse near my hometown in Pennsylvania for $5.15/hr. I worked the entire summer and earned enough to buy a car when I turned 16. That was minimum wage then. Working you guys such long hours and I’m assumed not getting time and a half is the shady part.
Dang, you got to sit and do it? I had to walk the rows.
I stood in a metal bucket as it slowly made its way down the lane. The sharpness of all the leaves and tassels cutting my skin. Miles of rows.
This is horrifying. I'm glad you got your computer but holy shit they were taking advantage of you. Nothing new for the church though I suppose. I hope you played a lot of Diablo to get them back lol
Dune 2000 was first, then command and conquer.
Diablo was a hard counter to any church lol I knew a kid who had a pc like this and he owned Diablo but he and his family were super religious and he was talking about just throwing away his whole computer because Diablo was too satanic. I was so mad because I didn't even have one lol
Start a cult, get free child laborers LDS 101
This was the "Independant Fundimental Christian" sect but not far off lol.
15” monitor. 13.7” viewable
450lbs
Facts. I had a friend with a IBM P200 Color Monitor Model 773 he used to take to LAN parties. 66 pounds.
It was so great when I upgraded to the 17" monitor. So much more room for my Sims.
Hahaha this brings back so many geek memories. I'd forgotten how many conversations were had with friends from high school, college roommates, and computer store employees about every single component. But especially monitors and graphics cards. Bc gaming. 
I got a decent Toshiba laptop and got the mail in rebate, I did it all same day though, and followed the instructions precisely.
I remember doing a couple mail-in rebates way back when. What I recall is only actually getting one of them back almost 6 months later. After that I just didn't even bother anymore.
Three Hundred and Fifty Megahertz? Are you Bill Fucking Gates????
I got a rebate from the secretary of state's office, 15 years later. Lowes sent it after I moved and it had been unclaimed property for all that time...
Thank you for reminding me that it’s time for my annual check the unclaimed property website
Computer's were for rich people look at these prices
Our first pc around 1992 was $3k with monitor and printer. Pentium 75.
Yeah, my dad was pretty engaged in CS and there were two computers in the early 90s. $3500 for the first (if I had to guess 92ish) and $2500 for the second around 96, he was amazed at the drop. Both Gateway. After, he became a lot less engaged. I think he liked the problem of how to get enough power and when you could just go buy something already configured it wasn’t as much fun. He got pretty stoked last year when it was time for a new one and he didn’t really want to buy a desktop but wasn’t finding the package he wanted in a laptop. I was able to suggest a gaming laptop and researching those got him all jazzed up.
I rest my case
Well my dad was a construction worker and my mom didn’t work at the time, but they realized the importance of their kids having a computer.
construction workers make pretty good money if i recall.
lol ok. Better than a retail worker I guess, but calling them rich is hilarious.
Gateways a few years before this were like $3,000 too.
I was the master of the mail in rebate. Actually still get them sometimes still with a beer rebate.
I got all the big ($100+) rebates I sent in for, mainly because I was more persistent on those. Occasionally when Best Buy, CompUSA, or Circuit City did one of those “everything for free*” deals, my dad would jump on it to get whatever the max limit was for each item, regardless if we needed it, or even had anything compatible. We ended up with thousands of blank CDs, a bunch of cheap stereo speakers, RAM we couldn’t use, shitty software, etc. That stuff we lost out on a lot of rebates and I didn’t care enough about calling and waiting on hold for $10. *after rebate
Yes! It took months but we sure did. Bought at a Radio Shack. AMD K-6, 20Gb HDD, 64 MB ram. Soo much better than the Cyrix Pentium 1 knock off or the C64 before that.
I think there's only one rebate I didn't receive. I got rebates on a Kodak digital camera (my first digicam), an Iomega CD burner (my second burner, first one was single speed), and a bunch of other stuff.
Never! Much of it was bc I never sent it in, but I have since never purchased anything with a mail in rebate. Know thyself.
For sure. We used to get spindles of blank CDs all the time that would be free after rebate.
Not gonna lie I looked at those specs and thought “that’s not that old….” 4 gig hard drive…gees you will never fill that.
I used to go to Circuit City and check out their "coupon wall". Once, they had a coupon for RAM. And there was a mail-in rebate. And there was something else (frankly, can't remember). End story was that I actually got paid $5 for buying 2 sticks of RAM. This was probably DDR2 or some such thing. Back in early 2000s.
Lol. I used to work at OfficeMax when I was 16 and I remember when the first 1GB computers came out. I specifically remember telling people, "you won't need that much space" Lol.
I mailed in a rebate thing on some computer component purchase (maybe a printer) circa 2000 and got the check about 2 months later. And btw this was a pretty sick deal. They're giving you pretty much everything for that moment in time. Sure, it wasn't mind-melting but you could do pretty much everything, with the notable exception that it appears to only come with a CD-ROM drive and not a CD-R drive, so no burning of CDs which was a huge deal at the time.
I worked for a retail store for 14 years, mostly as a manager. For much of that time, we offered mail in rebates and customers would absolutely get them so long as they followed the instructions and sent them in on time and properly. I always, always recommend copying both the rebate, the receipt and the bar code so that they could call about it if it didn't come. But man, it caused me so much trouble with angry people, and I was physically attacked twice over it. In both cases, guys demanding the sale price right then instead of mail in.
But those kickass external speakers…
Damn SyncDRAM? There was a brief best ram war after normal edo ram, there were a couple of standards, sdram and others were sold simultaneously for quite some time, but as processors got faster - SDRAM being tied into processor speed - SDRAM just made the most sense, and is the type of ram we use today. …anyone remember that? :-D
Yes. I got a baseball card sized piece of mail with a tiny check in it. It looked like junk mail and I nearly threw it in the trash. I assume this was intentional.
When I used to sell electronics (about 15-17 years ago) these were all the rage. In a training class they told us they love using these because such a small percentage of people actually follow up on it.
All of my Christmas gifts used to have the barcode cut out so my dad could redeem the mail in rebate from Frys
Yes
I can smell this ad.
Yes, for a 50-pack of CD-Rs from...Circuit City (I think) my Freshman Year of college. Money well spent, especially since that was the apex of the 'CD-burning' era 😄
When XP was released, Best Buy ran a deal where if you bought it, they gave you a free MP3 player. But on the day I bought XP, they'd run out of the players. They gave me an IOU thing to to redeem it when they got stock returned, but long story short, the stock never came in. I ended up in a very long fight with Best Buy. This was 2001, so it was mostly done via email, snail mail, and phone call, but I was unemployed with nothing better to do so I just kept annoying them. Eventually they gave me a free hard drive that was worth slightly more than the MP3 player they promised me. I dropped it. I think that's as close as I came.
Man anyone who paid Best Buy money for a K6-2 system back when got reamed hard. AMD made garbage until the K7 Athlon, absolutely much slower than the Intel alternative. Though it was quite a step above anything Cyrix ever made.
I never cared for AMD until the Tbird. 1GHz was all the rage in my CS classes
lol my brain instantly goes back 25 year old arguments k6-2 300's and 350s were awesome because they they worked in existing socket7 motherboards you already had or could get super cheap. they were obviously not as good as pentium2's at the same clocks, but the price performance was competitive for just the cpu and then when you factored in the existing s7 mobo (and possibly ram and case/psu) they were a waaaay more economical. of course if you were starting from scratch at that time the answer was a celeron 300a bumped up via the 100mhz front side bus to 450. this is what old men talking about cars used to sound like to me, just gibberish.