With its Holstein cow-patterned boxes and buildings and its Country Store computer outlets, Gateway has turned folksy American charm into a brand identity.

Perhaps this was a combination fated not to sell well abroad, where the black-and-white spotted containers tended to be viewed with bemusement rather than amusement by Irish and other buyers.

But in the US, the company has always been well-liked - seen as quirky and friendly, but also wily and capable, able to sneak up on more stolid computing giants such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Americans like that combination, and for over a dozen years Gateway was seen as having a big hat and plenty of cattle, rather than being all image - with a big hat and no cattle. Gateway also has one of the better-known founders and chief executives in the computer business in Ted Waitt.

With his long pony-tail, jeans and trademark snakeskin cowboy boots, Waitt stands out against the bland ranks of industry executives like a Holstein in a green field.

He even chain-smokes - a habit regarded with horror in most boardrooms - and is prone to blasting blues, rock and zydeco music from his office speakers. And he comes from Sioux City, South Dakota - how uncool can you get?

But Waitt put that prairie background to good business effect. Son in a family of four generations of cattle dealers, Waitt came up with the idea for Gateway with his brother Norm while staying in an Iowa farmhouse. He was all of 22, and twice a college drop-out (once from the University of Colorado, once from the University of Iowa).

The idea for what was then called Gateway 2000 was simple - instead of offering a set range of PCs, why not let consumers pick from hundreds of possible combinations of components?

Each PC was built to order and shipped directly from Gateway, and before long - and after some glitches - the company was also known for fast technical help by phone.

Gateway also made sure it offered the latest technology as standard, demonstrating Waitt's geek-smarts ability to understand that what people really wanted in a computer was whatever was new - not necessarily the cheapest price or sexiest image.

Thus, Gateway customers got Pentium processors, colour monitors and CD-Rom drives before anyone else.

Gateway's first advertisements featured its cow mascot and the catchphrase, "Computers from Iowa?"

Set against the sleek image of Apple's Macintosh and the practical no-nonsense tech personality of IBM, Gateway's hokey sales pitch worked. You couldn't get more user-friendly than computers from Iowa - or eventually, Sioux City, once Waitt moved operations back to his home town.

Waitt said he wanted Gateway to be "the IT department for the masses". But by the late 1990s the market was changing. Gateway needed to broaden its offerings if it wanted to survive as brutal price wars engulfed PC makers.

In 1997 the company began a drive into the corporate market that failed to have much success - cows really didn't seem to do it for corporate America.

Gateway also worked on the international market, but international sales never totalled more than 12 to 14 per cent of total revenue.

Waitt stepped down as CEO in 1999 and stayed on as chairman, moving Gateway's headquarters, but not most operations, to the salubrious San Diego, California suburb of La Jolla.

By January of this year, he was back in the CEO saddle amid serious problems at the company - a large drop in sales, multi-million dollar losses in Europe and a need for new strategies. The decision to cut losses in Europe and Asia and refocus on the market that Gateway knows best - America - will have been a major one for Waitt.

In the US press, the move was widely hailed as the right one: "tough, but the right decision" said Forbes. "Catering to global markets just isn't in [Gateway's] DNA." In other words, the cows have come home, but to our loss.