How Two Bored 1970s Housewives Helped Create the PC Industry

harrymcc writes: One of the first significant PC companies was Vector Graphic. Founded in 1976, it was an innovator in everything from industrial design to sales and marketing, and eventually went public. And alone among early PC makers, it was founded and run by two women, Lore Harp and Carole Ely. Over at Fast Company, Benj Edwards tells the story of this fascinating, forgotten company.

Comments

No Facebook, no Farmville, no Solitaire...

[rodrigoandrade]

So let's create our own, damnit!!

A story of how women were

[1_brown_mouse]

Run out of the tech industry by the forces of Misogyny.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

<blink>This is what Gamergate thinks every article involving women is about.</blink>

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it with SJWs that makes them imagine they or [insert preferred minority] are the target of hostility. If you knew anything about the neckbeards and mouthbreathers that are programmers you would know that they're hostile to everybody. Just because some women felt put off by the hostility and let that inform their decision to get out of the industry doesn't make it misogyny. The only thing fueling an upswing in misogyny are all the people who poo pooed the computer industry as a fad who now want to get in on the money.

Re:A story of how women were

[Austerity Empowers]

I think the article stands on its own as an attempt to show how (insert favorite "oppressed" group) was relevant in major events in history. You can hardly sit through a history course anymore without a somewhat distracting aside explaining that soandso was gay, and/or possibly a woman, or had some mixed heritage etc. While simultaneously trying to explain that history is about critical thinking, and distracting that critical thinking with irrelevant asides, a mixed message is sent.

There's no reason a woman could not have been a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but as it happens, a woman wasn't. Irrelevant housewives in a failed company don't really figure in. The article even points out that there were quite a few attempts at a PC back then, most of which failed when the IBM PC manifested. Even Apple almost did not survive it. I would argue, additionally, that even Apple had next to 0 influence on the PC market, except perhaps in encouraging Windows to exist before it was ready (but ultimately sealing Apple's fate as an also-ran in the PC market). Even very significant companies were destroyed that really did define direction at the time: Sun? SGI? Ironically even IBM is not in the business anymore, and it's big iron division is facing a lot of challenges from what IBM itself created. These were all the significant bits of computer history.

Talking about two housewives in a company that failed before it started is a feel-good story at best, a lame attempt at social justice at worst.

Re:A story of how women were

[JoshuaZ]

Instead of making obnoxious remarks, why don't you actually read the article?

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll just leave this quote from the second paragraph of the article here: "a PC designed by Lore's husband, Bob Harp."

Re:A story of how women were

[TWX]

This XKCD sums it up rather well actually...

People are quick to assign characteristics of an individual to a group to whom the individual belongs. Look at how often an individual with a characteristic that isn't of the majority is aked their opinion as if it represents that of the minority to whom they are a part. Unfortunately it's also inaccurate. If Mike asks Johnny, who's a nerd, if he likes pizza, and Johnny replies no, he doesn't like pizza, Mike might draw the conclusion that nerds don't like pizza, even when it may only be Mike that doesn't like pizza, or even something as simple as Mike can't process dairy, so he can't eat the stuff even if he wants to.

I think you're also misusing Social Justice Warrior, which I think means someone otherwise-unaffected by the injustice that acts as a self-appointed mercenary and doesn't coordinate their efforts with those who actually are affected by the injustice either. They think they're doing good, and for all we know many may actually be doing good, but at the same time if they're not consulting those affected by the injustice and acting in-concert with those people's movements and leadership then they might actually cause more harm than good if they make the movement itself visibly look bad.

As to your other point, about, "neckbeards and mouthbreathers that are programmers you would know that they're hostile to everybody," this is actually more true than a lot of people realize. There are cases where women have perceived behavior in the workplace to be hostile toward them, when in reality they're actually being treated the same as the men are treating each other; in-effect they have been accepted as, "just one of the guys," but they don't realize that the guys treat each other like crap and now they're just getting the same as everyone else gets. Certainly that's not all cases of workplace harassment, but I have seen it first-hand and usually it's the result of the entire workplace degenerating, and companies end up cracking down on it in strange ways, like with uniforms, work-area inspections, and other things that simply keep employees too busy to harang each other. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the employer structurally reorganizes instead.

Re:A story of how women were

[jedidiah]

Lore was the proverbial Jobs or Gates of that particular enterprise.

Re:A story of how women were

[1_brown_mouse]

Hold on now! Lets not get all radical and crazy! Honestly, it was a response to the clickbait headline and current milieu.

Re:A story of how women were

[DrVxD]

You don't seem to understand how slashdice works...

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

You are ascribing importance to a company that had no significant impact on the industry simply because it was founded by two housewives. How is that not asinine tripe?

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

The company was highly successful at the time, went public, and years later failed after the IBM/DOS combination came to dominate. Yet because the company was founded by two "housewives", you deny its success and importance.

You forgot about how the husband Bob Harp did the actual work of designing the products, only to have her subsequently run the company into the ground.

Re:A story of how women were

[FranTaylor]

now they're just getting the same as everyone else gets.

So what you're saying is that men are too stupid to complain about bad working conditions and that the problem with women is that they won't play along with this bullshit.

Re:A story of how women were

[Austerity Empowers]

...distracting that critical thinking with irrelevant asides...

That's a flat-out idiotic comment.

First made first my by history professor in freshman year in college. She was a woman. She predicted Scotland would try for independence one day in my lifetime (and we laughed), and that Russia would once again become a talked about threat, in addition to a number of other things. This was 20 years ago. She seemed pretty smart, but she wasn't the type to suffer idiocy.

Talking about two housewives in a company that failed before it started is a feel-good story at best, a lame attempt at social justice at worst.

The company was highly successful at the time, went public, and years later failed after the IBM/DOS combination came to dominate. Yet because the company was founded by two "housewives", you deny its success and importance.

Or, because housewives was the headline term, and the subject of the article, thus it was brought in to the discussion by the author. If this was about how influential Vector Graphics was, the title might have read "Vector Graphic - The Influential PC Vendor You Never Heard Of" or something along those lines. Clearly however, this article is about two housewives and their failed start-up.

Absolutely nothing in the article substantiates your claim that Vector Graphics was at all relevant to the PC industry other than an ability to get headlines and make itself known. It failed in every way that marked the success of the PC, was defeated in the PC market by Apple and was eliminated entirely by the IBM PC. It's one of many, many companies that had a brief moment in the sun and disappeared. This article isn't about that, it's about the two housewives who ran it and the ensuing drama of the 70s tech biz. It's entire value is "hey look what these women almost did", you could say the same about countless people in countless businesses, the only thing unusual is that it's two women, particularly two housewives. That doesn't make it newsworthy for most people, particularly if you see no reason why housewives couldn't be successful. It's more useful to people who somehow think they can't.

Re:A story of how women were

[Bengie]

Men are more likely to find a light amount of hazing to be socially bonding.

Re:A story of how women were

[TWX]

Close. Some men actually like the BS working conditions (after all they usually are the cause), some go along with it, and some keep their mouths shut even if they don't like it because it's kind of necessary to have a job and even a crappy one is better than none and complaining might not succeed in getting the problems corrected.

I've known some women that will participate and can be as bad at offending as some of the worst men, I've known women that participate some because it can help them get a leg-up in the org chart and in their careers. I've known women that were ambivalent and managed to stay out of the fray. I've known women that were unhappy that their disapproval and lack of participation seemed to hurt their careers. I've known women to complain to no benefit. I've known at least one woman that did complain, but she had enough demerits for other reasons that they chose to let her go and with those demerits she couldn't really mount much of a counter-argument that had gravitas.

That's the thing, each woman, each man, each person has their own reactions and own motivations. Often people will react similarly to each other, but that doesn't mean that they always will, or that even similar circumstances repeating themselves will cause the same reactions in every case. Unfortunately just about everyone forgets to treat others as they themselves want to be treated, or they somehow interpret his to their own desires rather than being civil to those they are around. It also doesn't help that familiarity breeds contempt; when we learn of the flaws of our fellows we are more apt to judge them more on their flaws than on their strengths of character.

Re:A story of how women were

[cheesybagel]

I had never heard of it before. People talk about the TRS-80, the Atari 800, Commodore 64, Sinclair, I even heard of the Dragon, Oric. Never this one.

Then again it seems to be a lot older. From the era of the Altair 8800 so its little wonder I never heard about it.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

Women are bad at math! Oh the humanity. In the meanwhile, men are rapist, misogynist, violent abuser.

Feminist suffer from psychological projection. They hate men, feel bad about it and therefore assume that men must hate women.

If there is a 'gender club' somewhere it is a women club, and it is the whole society. That feminist non-sense is annoying and I am sick of seeing it on slashdot.

Re:A story of how women were

[FranTaylor]

Then again it seems to be a lot older. From the era of the Altair 8800 so its little wonder I never heard about it.

Now I understand why most Americans can't come to grips with their slavery heritage. All they know is what they read on the internet.

Re:A story of how women were

[FranTaylor]

Men are more likely to find a light amount of hazing to be socially bonding.

They are training each other on how to treat everyone else.

Re:A story of how women were

[FranTaylor]

Unfortunately just about everyone forgets to treat others as they themselves want to be treated

This is 100% wrong, people treat others EXACTLY the way that they are expecting others to treat them. If they are mean and rude to other people it is because they are expecting other people to be mean and rude to them. If they are kind and understanding to others it is because they expect others to be kind and understanding.

Re:A story of how women were

[FranTaylor]

Feminist suffer from psychological projection.

pot, kettle, black

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fairly apparent that you weren't around the beginnings of the microcomputer revolution of the '70's. When the Altair appeared on the cover of the January 1975 Popular Electronics (still have my copy) its designer, Ed Roberts, expected to sell a few dozen - a niche market for geeky electronics hobbyists. IBM would not have even gotten into the market if it weren't for the likes of companies like Vector Graphic, Processor Technology, NorthStar, Godbout, Morrow Designs, Cromemco, PolyMorphic and many others. The original IBM PC came standard with a cassette tape interface for program storage and its extra cost floppy stored only 160kb with a DOS that barely worked at a time when all the S-100 machines supported 360kb or higher 5.25" floppies as well as 8" floppies on the industry standard OS of CP/M. IBM was embarrassed by not being part of the this new micro revolution and developed the PC initially just to show it could. It was as unprepared for its success as a business machine as Ed Roberts was with the hundreds of initial orders of the Altair. If it weren't for the business IT guys' "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM" attitude and the porting of VisiCalc over to the IBM PC with its eventual replacement by Lotus 1-2-3, IBM's PC could have been seen as the computer giants 'too little, too late' entry. For accounting departments which had discovered VisiCalc on the Apple ][ it allowed them to purchase a 'proper looking' business machine to run their spreadsheets with the approval of the IT department.

And unfortunately your dismissive misogynistic attitude obscures your lack of understanding about what the microcomputing revolution meant back then - the introduction for a single individual of a powerful tool that had broken free of the glass walled rooms jealously guarded by the IT clergy. More than one Apple or S-100 machine was listed on an invoice as a 'calculator' to avoid the male-dominated high priests of corporate computing.

Re:A story of how women were

[TWX]

Two sides of the same coin. Call it the idealist (want to be treated) versus the pragmatic (through experience, expect to be treated). There is a solution, but it requires someone to voluntarily take the first step, or it requires an enforced change from above, and just about everyone in the system is upset by it even if it weeds-out the bad apples and makes it better for everyone else.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

And they're correct! Computers and digital devices are misogynistic by design. They have no support at all for female accessibility features, like breast gesture recognition or a labia-actuated input device. Don't try and tell me these things were omitted by accident. Steve Jobs named one of his first computers LISA, a woman's name, because he saw computers like he viewed women - something to buy, sell, and use.

The PC industry is sexist. Only Slashdot can save it now by running more articles exposing the hatred built into every computer, tablet, and phone.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

Well then, you kind of failed thinking critically about the larger context.

On the one hand, you have feminist stating how women were historically disenfranchised from all matters of career and business. On the other, you have all of these women celebrated for apparent having careers.

Well, which is it then? Either they were disenfranchised, or history has a tendency of making unicorns.

Hell, talk to your mom and grandmother about what it was like being a woman back in the day. I did. My mom has run several successful business since the 1950s. When presenting her the feminist narrative of what it's like being a woman, her response was "most women are dumb. They expect to be catered to, which makes them dependent for most of their lives, but they don't make the connection".

And in the interest of equal time, she has also stated "most men are dumb. They are too easily swayed by a nice pair of boobs".

She describes most male/female interaction as mutual abuse. Make of it what you will.

Re:A story of how women were

[chipschap]

Now I understand why most Americans can't come to grips with their slavery heritage.

I don't understand this constant call for retroactive guilt. Yes, America has a heritage of slavery. Yes, it is shameful and nothing about it was ever right.

But that was then and this is now. Why are we today, we who had nothing to do with the sins of the past, and who (with the exception of some wackos) completely reject the idea of slavery, told to feel guilt and told that we have to somehow feel inferior because people in the past did bad things?

Should the Japanese and Germans of today feel guilty about war crimes that they themselves did not commit?

Of course, we all need to remain vigilant, to ensure that the past is not repeated. But that's more a matter of human nature than something specifically American (or German or Japanese or what-have-you).

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that men are too stupid to complain about bad working conditions and that the problem with women is that they won't play along with this bullshit.

Yes, [too many] men are too stupid to complain and tend to keep their job and [too many] women are stupid enough to complain and then be fired or quit when things don't change. I do love have you spin it as the stupidity of men and the problem with women, though. It nicely twists it as though men are actually stupid for valuing their job over the abuse when they realize they likely can't do anything about it--quitting doesn't really count since that doesn't change the company they were working at and their new job may be as bad or worse. And it (presumably) sarcastically states it as a "problem with women" that they'd dare to change the status quo and when they're unfairly fired or when they have enough and quit, at least they were "smart" to cause "problem(s)" and fight an injustice system. Well, unfortunately without either readily enforced laws (lawsuits don't count since they're not readily enforced), massively unionized boycott of such behavior, or having a new CEO/president/whatever who really wants to see change happen, things aren't going to change at the scale of the endemic problem being resolved in any sustained, wide-spread fashion. Everything else and you're just accepting that a lot (if not a majority) of companies will be shitty; the shittier companies will likely get worse (as those who wish to abuse will gravitate to the companies that can abuse in); and people will either be paid more for it, derive some other sort of in-job benefit (easier work, less required overtime, etc), or they'll suffer without any real extra benefit because the job market is well saturated and there isn't much room to migrate to one of the better companies.

Or in short, if you're the breadwinner and have had a lifetime of learning to put up with bullshit to be "manly" you'll tolerate a shitty job. And anything less and you'll be called a pussy or a "Millennial" or whatever and people will decry you without really looking at the why. I mean, honestly, considering the advancements in productivity, if you're working more than ~20 hours/week, you're the same sort of chump as everyone else Because the 40 hour work week was an arbitrary standard to set (8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure, 8 hours of sleep with 2 days off) and as much there's no reason we couldn't or shouldn't have a second unionized revolution to drop the hours to work in half again and maybe even add an extra day off a week.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

keep the dice narrative prattle off slasdot please.

Re:A story of how women were

[0123456]

What is it with SJWs that makes them imagine they or [insert preferred minority] are the target of hostility.

SJWs always project. They hate everyone, so they believe everyone hates them, too.

Re:A story of how women were

[DarkOx]

No the parent is right. This was a moderate sized fish, and one of many in a then very tiny pond. IBM and to a lessor extent Apple made the market. This company was just one of many PC vendors, few people out side the valley and various hobby communities could have ever named.

The technology they had was largely stuff from elsewhere. In fact that is what in many ways hobbled them. The few places where they might have been leading edge were being independently replicated else by designs that were as good or better.

So I think you over state its importance. Its a bit like arguing The Bell Motor Car Company help shape the American auto industry. I suppose you might think that if you happened to be in Central Pennsylvania in the mid 20s but the rest of the world would have said Bell who? They put together a nice car for its day but mostly using concepts and technology that were widely available and did not do anything revolutionary, nor were they a major player. Same here Vector built a fine personal computer for the 1970s but so did everyone else and their brother.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

How? Please do explain? Where did I said that hate women, and therefore projecting that women must hate men?

is "pot, kettle, black" supposed to win any argument? If that is the case then pot, kettle, black back at you, idiot. Also calling mirror, and final point. Final, I said. So childish, much debate.

Re:A story of how women were

[BadgerRush]

There's no reason a woman could not have been a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, ...

No reason? Really?

In their early careers, both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had many meetings (with investors, prospective clients, and other companies) that where key to their success at the time. In many of those meetings they didn't have much of a product or results to show, relying mostly on selling themselves as "someone who can get the job done" (e.g. Gates initial deal with IBM, selling them an OS that he didn't have yet). So you are saying that none of those meetings would have a different outcome if the young entrepreneur was a woman instead? That none of the investors or clients would trust the entrepreneur's abilities a little less because of some deep bias, and consequently decline a key deal?

Re:A story of how women were

[preaction]

I don't have points, but this AC needs some upvotes.

Re:A story of how women were

[goose-incarnated]

...distracting that critical thinking with irrelevant asides...

That's a flat-out idiotic comment.

[a whole bunch of other confused tripe]

Talking about two housewives in a company that failed before it started is a feel-good story at best, a lame attempt at social justice at worst.

The company was highly successful at the time, went public, and years later failed after the IBM/DOS combination came to dominate. Yet because the company was founded by two "housewives", you deny its success and importance.

It was not "founded by two housewives". It was founded on the basis of a product created by a man who gifted his bored wife with it to sell. She subsequently took the product, kicked him out and failed miserably. Seriously, read the article.

Re:A story of how women were

[dinfinity]

Ouch.

"Bob Harp's memory board worked well, and he recognized that it could serve as a lucrative commercial product. Lacking the time and resources to commercialize it, he put it on the back burner for almost a year. But in 1976, when his wife and Ely were trying to hatch a business, he offered his Altair memory board as a potential product.

As exciting as the opportunity sounded to Lore, computers represented completely foreign territory for both her and Ely (and, for that matter, nearly everyone else on the planet in 1976). Lore recalls: "I called my friend and I said, 'Carole, what do you think about starting a computer company? I have this little 8K RAM board.' She said, 'What’s a RAM board?'""

It get's much, much worse:

"With a good technical underpinning and a focus on style and aesthetics, they knew their boards could stand ahead of the pack. The pair even went so far as to seek out specifically-hued capacitors that would not clash with the other components on their circuit boards. "I don’t know what people thought of us: two females looking for colored capacitors," Ely told InfoWorld in 1982. "But we were interested in what colors went into our boards." "

All in all, it's more of a confirmation of traditional gender roles than it is of breaking through them. Bonus classic permeating theme: gloryless underappreciated innovative techies versus fairly run-of-the-mill wildly successful sales people (yes, I'm biased).

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

What access to education and resources were women denied in the 1960s or '70s that men had access to? I'll wait...

Re:A story of how women were

[FranTaylor]

we who had nothing to do with the sins of the past,

this is exactly what I'm talking about, ignorance of the sins of the present

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

This is 100% wrong, people treat others EXACTLY the way that they are expecting others to treat them..

That is often false. There are many people who expect to be treated with honor and deference, but treat everyone else like crap.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Re:A story of how women were

[hairyfeet]

No he isn't, because if you think a group so fucking hate filled that you can play Stormfront or SJW and have a seriously hard time telling an SJW post from the Neo-Nazi thinks they are "doing good" instead of just picking a group to hate? Well then I have a bridge you might be interested in. I used to think the stereotype of SJWs being self hating beta CIS males was likewise bullshit until we had article after article like this one where a white male liberal professor calls for the extermination of all white males. BTW notice how he doesn't say white females, that is because to bigoted fucks like him white females are to be given as prizes to black males for "historical oppression". He even says "At least a white woman can have sex with a black man and make a brown baby but what can a white male do? He's good for nothing. " So...yeah, sometimes stereotypes are true and SJWs being whipped, self hating, prideless, spineless little bigots as pointed out by many gamergate supporters? Kinda on the nose.

As for TFA? No wonder this company didn't survive, not when the women were writing ads like "Altair and Imsai mothers deserve beautiful 8K babies" and picking caps based on whether or not they would clash with the board...DaFuq? Its a 1970s chipboard going in a big fugly white box, why not tell me what its gonna do for my system instead of me thinking about babies for no damned reason, and why would I give a wet fart about whether the caps clash or not when its going in a big fugly box with no windows? From the sounds of it they were trying for a "form over function" a good 25 years before PCs would have glass sides so anybody would care about that shit. Hell look at their "PC" design, green or orange with a fricking racing stripe and only a power and reset at a time when nearly everything was done with dip switches....why would somebody in the late 70s want to severely limit their inputs (and from the looks of the prices pay a good 20%+ extra) just to get a system with a racing stripe and color coordinated motherboards? Remember at the time the PC buyers were tinkerers with soldering irons, personal computers weren't even in your average office at that time.

If I took anything away from TFA its not that IBM killed 'em, it was that they were trying to be hipster a good 30 years before that was a thing and without Steve Jobs ability to get people pumped about buying extremely limited systems compared to the competition. And before any Apple fans breakout the pitchforks? Woz has written several times about how many times he was frustrated over hardware design choices being made NOT for what would be the best choice for the user but by Jobs pursuit of style, the most memorable was the Apple you had to drop on the table to reseat the chips because Jobs didn't like fans. of course Jobs had his incredible salesmanship to keep him going until tech caught up with his taste in design, this bunch had "8K babies"...groan.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

Concerning the hostility, as I grow older I observe that many times programmers are hostile to everyone, including other programmers. They're often burnt out, or trying to grab as much glory as possible. Sometimes that glory is deserved, sometimes not. Basically it's the old "if everyone sucks, I look good" play; but, from the point of view of the person making that play, they don't see what they are doing... They think they are self-promoting.

So instead of stating "I did a good job" they state "You didn't do as good of a job as me because..." and the world becomes a little less friendly.

There's far too much grandstanding in software development, I guess it comes from the myth of the brilliant asshole. i.e. Brilliant people are assholes, so assholes get mistaken for brilliant people.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

How? Please do explain? Where did I said that hate women, and therefore projecting that women must hate men?

is "pot, kettle, black" supposed to win any argument? If that is the case then pot, kettle, black back at you, idiot. Also calling mirror, and final point. Final, I said. So childish, much debate.

AC, you also said in that same post,

Women are bad at math! Oh the humanity. In the meanwhile, men are rapist, misogynist, violent abuser.

You may not know it, but that statement is the kind of statement made by misogynists when lashing out at women.
We have no way of knowing if you personally are a misogynist, but because you say things like the things that misogynists say, then it is correct for us to reply to your statement as if you were a women-hater.

Therefore, when you said that feminists hate men through psychological projection because they assume men hate women , then we reply as if you are a misogynist that hates women through psychological projection because misogynists assume women hate men.

I can explain further if you still do not understand why pot, kettle, black is an appropriate response.

Re:A story of how women were

[FranTaylor]

just about everyone in the system is upset by it even if it weeds-out the bad apples and makes it better for everyone else.

just about everyone gets upset by a call to treat people equally and with compassion? really?

Re:A story of how women were

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

The computers you mention were marketed to home users and individual users. ( For example, I knew several proffesors who bought them to play with the then new researxch area fractals. )

Vectors were sold to businesses that is why you never heard of them.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again it seems to be a lot older. From the era of the Altair 8800 so its little wonder I never heard about it.

Now I understand why most Americans can't come to grips with their slavery heritage. All they know is what they read on the internet.

I'd be interested to hear of any country that came to grips with their slavery heritage.

Re:A story of how women were

[LWATCDR]

You left out that they failed when they did not listen to the husband/techie/mans advice and produced a PC compatible.
Had they done that they might have been Compaq.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

That statement is a reference to the OP's xkcd post. Let me rewrite it in plain language for stupid peoples;

Some misogynist claim all women are bad at math. OMG THIS IS TERRIBLE! On the other hand some misandrist claim all men are rapist, violent, misogynist abusers.

Be real for a second, how difficult it is to by stereotyped as 'bad at math'? At least one can prove he or she is good at math by doing good math. There is no way you can possibly prove not being a misogynist or serial rapist. And according to feminist theories, as a man, that is exactly what you are. You are male, you got a penis, you are the enemy. INB4 that is extremist feminism. No, that is the norm. That is the feminism that is taught in women's study in our universities and colleges.

Pot, kettle, black is never a appropriate response. It is childish and never constructive. Try to assume good faith and read the whole fucking thread instead posting shit in discussion you did not follow.

Re:A story of how women were

[chipschap]

There are plenty of sins of the present to go around. But slavery in America was specifically mentioned, and whatever today's American ills may be, that's not one of them.

Re:A story of how women were

[SylvesterTheCat]

I think (at least in my case) that it is simply below my give-a-crap threshold.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe what you meant to say was most people are disenfranchised. It's not like most people are born with money and connections.

You are absolutely right, there is a lot of information I am leaving out.

Such as she was essentially a war refugee, spoke little English, and had the equivalent of a 7th grade formal education.

She was also a divorcee when she got into business, and was a single mom for most of that time.

In context, being a woman was the least of the strikes against her. In fact, she describes it as an asset. See the part about the boobs.

Re:A story of how women were

[Darinbob]

What is it with the idiots who say "SJW" like it's some massive conspiracy or even an insult. Social justice is a good thing, anyone who disagrees has some seriously messed up world views; so fighting for social justice should also be good. The fight over SJW is like that with Gamergate, part of a confusing set of code words that makes sure the outside world will have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

... She subsequently took the product, kicked him out and failed miserably.

So a lot like the original "Octopussy" (1966) short story. I hate that 'Cuddy' turned it into a (1983) movie about a domestic violence victim who is saved by a man: So much for the man-bashing feminism of the day. Also sad for '007' that he's playing the hero for a woman that contributes little to the story. Al least in "On her majesty's secret service" (1969) and "The spy who loved me" (1977), the woman is an action figure contributing to the story.

Re:A story of how women were

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

Well then, I'm nearly a rock star. I am the next Beatles/Hendrix/Elvis/. If only it weren't for all those successful musicians I would be much much famouser.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

That statement is a reference to the OP's xkcd post. Let me rewrite it in plain language for stupid peoples;

Some misogynist claim all women are bad at math. OMG THIS IS TERRIBLE! On the other hand some misandrist claim all men are rapist, violent, misogynist abusers.

Be real for a second, how difficult it is to by stereotyped as 'bad at math'? At least one can prove he or she is good at math by doing good math. There is no way you can possibly prove not being a misogynist or serial rapist. And according to feminist theories, as a man, that is exactly what you are. You are male, you got a penis, you are the enemy. INB4 that is extremist feminism. No, that is the norm. That is the feminism that is taught in women's study in our universities and colleges.

Pot, kettle, black is never a appropriate response. It is childish and never constructive. Try to assume good faith and read the whole fucking thread instead posting shit in discussion you did not follow.

You responded to the post referring to the xkcd cartoon with this:

Women are bad at math! Oh the humanity. In the meanwhile, men are rapist, misogynist, violent abuser.

Feminist suffer from psychological projection. They hate men, feel bad about it and therefore assume that men must hate women.

If there is a 'gender club' somewhere it is a women club, and it is the whole society. That feminist non-sense is annoying and I am sick of seeing it on slashdot.

You claim you were responding to the xkcd cartoon.
You replied with sarcasm and ill-informed generalizations, so it is you that set childish tone.
If you had read the rest of TWX's post, you would understand how inappropriate your reply was.
Read it now, please.

As for the AC who responded to your "psychological projection" statement,
the statement pot, kettle, black is succinct and correct, and in keeping with the tone that you set.

As for not being able to prove that you're not a misogynist, it's not possible for you to do that because you say the things that misogynists say.
Most of the rest of us don't have that problem.

Re:A story of how women were

[dinfinity]

I bow my head in shame.
'gets'

I meant 'gets'.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called collectivism. Some people believe the group (Americans) takes precedence over the individual (you) even when you were not alive when said group committed Known Heinous Acts.

Re:A story of how women were

[MightyDrunken]

Sounds as bad as this

Steve started critiquing the layout on a purely esthetic basis. "That part's really pretty", he proclaimed. "But look at the memory chips. That's ugly. The lines are too close together".

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

What access to education and resources were women denied in the 1960s or '70s that men had access to? I'll wait...

Almost no engineering universities accepted female applicants in general admission until the late 1960's. There were females admitted, but those were admitted on exceptional basis and were often the child of a faculty member or large donor alumni.
Some schools admitted females in the late 1800's/early 1900's, but that was stopped after WWI. There were some later sporatic changes in admission policies,
but after WWII, there was strong lash-back against females taking up slots that should go to "our boys back from the war".
General open admissions did not begin until the late 1960's for most engineering schools
I believe that pretty much everyone allowed them in through open admission by the early 1970's (Caltech was 1970). Probably due to Title IX.

Medical schools for physicians (I'm not talking about nurses) was almost as bad regarding open admissions for females.
Harvard changed its policy in 1945, you may find some of their comments enlightening.
http://hms.harvard.edu/departm...

Re:A story of how women were

[chipschap]

What a load of crap. What we're responsible for today is to make sure those things (or equivalent bad things) don't happen again. Collectively or individually we can't be responsible for what happened when we weren't even here.

I'd swear that there is a whole contingent who just loves feeling guilty.

Re:A story of how women were

[I'm New Around Here]

Is this your first time on slashdot?

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

This article seems similar to the ones where something rather ordinary was done, but because it was done by a high school student, it was written and bandied around as a great achievement.

(as opposed to a high school student doing things that even adults would find difficult. Then that sounds more newsworthy...)

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

Might want to avoid linking to articles quoting satire pieces as evidence in the future ... https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1014-a-professor-tries-to-beat-back-a-news-spoof-that-won-t-go-away?cid=VTEVPMSED1

What is an SJW?

Re:A story of how women were

[edjs]

I used to think the stereotype of SJWs being self hating beta CIS males was likewise bullshit until we had article after article like this one where a white male liberal professor calls for the extermination of all white males. BTW notice how he doesn't say white females, that is because to bigoted fucks like him white females are to be given as prizes to black males for "historical oppression". He even says "At least a white woman can have sex with a black man and make a brown baby but what can a white male do? He's good for nothing. " So...yeah, sometimes stereotypes are true . . .

Did you miss the caveat the journalist added at the bottom of the story, noting that he picked the story up from a satirical news blog?

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

Ease off the man hate, sexist.

Re:A story of how women were

[Locando]

We shouldn't feel guilty about slavery, but we ought to, I don't know, not necessarily feel guilt but at least think twice about how those of us in the middle class have benefited, and continue to benefit, from the shitstorm of not-quite-giving-equal-rights that proceeded for a hundred years after, and then for our government saying "OK! Equal rights for all! We're off the hook for any damage caused that may persist as a result of lingering racism and the past 350 years of fucking you in the ass!" right around the time we determined that Martin Luther King Jr. was a really awesome guy. Which, incidentally, roughly coincided with his getting shot in the head.

There was a government policy in the 20th century, redlining, that was really fucked up and was instituted to propagate the kind of segregation that the white majority deemed necessary after the 13th Amendment let far more black people free than they were, by and large, at all comfortable with; some of the victims of redlining are still alive today. And even if we account for the fact that most people forced into shitty, segregated neighborhoods are dead, if we have our eyes open about this shit we still have to reconcile ourselves with the connection between government-sponsored segregation and the existence of de facto black- and Hispanic-only neighborhoods today, the ones that started decaying when black people were restricted by law from getting anywhere near the same kind of income that whites got, the ones that white people suddenly decided they weren't touching with a ten-foot pole as soon as they became integrated. It was there that generational accumulation of wealth was sliced in the Achilles tendons. That's what we're still dealing with today, and the problems with criminality, drug use, broken homes, and what have you in the ghettos are inextricably tied up in the poverty that exists there. The fact that a sizable minority of blacks have pulled themselves up from that (or that African immigrants have come here from a vastly different background and social capital, and prospered) has nothing to do with the direct lineage of not giving a fuck, and then not giving much of a fuck (but more than before), about poor black Americans on the part of American society as a whole that persists to this day.

Re:A story of how women were

[Nyder]

No he isn't, because if you think a group so fucking hate filled that you can play Stormfront or SJW and have a seriously hard time telling an SJW post from the Neo-Nazi thinks they are "doing good" instead of just picking a group to hate? Well then I have a bridge you might be interested in. I used to think the stereotype of SJWs being self hating beta CIS males was likewise bullshit until we had article after article like this one where a white male liberal professor calls for the extermination of all white males. BTW notice how he doesn't say white females, that is because to bigoted fucks like him white females are to be given as prizes to black males for "historical oppression". He even says "At least a white woman can have sex with a black man and make a brown baby but what can a white male do? He's good for nothing. "
So...yeah, sometimes stereotypes are true and SJWs being whipped, self hating, prideless, spineless little bigots as pointed out by many gamergate supporters? Kinda on the nose.

As for TFA? No wonder this company didn't survive, not when the women were writing ads like "Altair and Imsai mothers deserve beautiful 8K babies" and picking caps based on whether or not they would clash with the board...DaFuq? Its a 1970s chipboard going in a big fugly white box, why not tell me what its gonna do for my system instead of me thinking about babies for no damned reason, and why would I give a wet fart about whether the caps clash or not when its going in a big fugly box with no windows? From the sounds of it they were trying for a "form over function" a good 25 years before PCs would have glass sides so anybody would care about that shit. Hell look at their "PC" design, green or orange with a fricking racing stripe and only a power and reset at a time when nearly everything was done with dip switches....why would somebody in the late 70s want to severely limit their inputs (and from the looks of the prices pay a good 20%+ extra) just to get a system with a racing stripe and color coordinated motherboards? Remember at the time the PC buyers were tinkerers with soldering irons, personal computers weren't even in your average office at that time.

If I took anything away from TFA its not that IBM killed 'em, it was that they were trying to be hipster a good 30 years before that was a thing and without Steve Jobs ability to get people pumped about buying extremely limited systems compared to the competition. And before any Apple fans breakout the pitchforks? Woz has written several times about how many times he was frustrated over hardware design choices being made NOT for what would be the best choice for the user but by Jobs pursuit of style, the most memorable was the Apple you had to drop on the table to reseat the chips because Jobs didn't like fans. of course Jobs had his incredible salesmanship to keep him going until tech caught up with his taste in design, this bunch had "8K babies"...groan.

Weird, I read the same article and what I saw was the same mistakes other companies at the time made. Didn't get in bed with IBM.

Your view seems to be colored by your hatred of women.

Re:A story of how women were

[adhdengineer]

We call those "Management" and we speak ill of them when they are not around.

Re:A story of how women were

[Anonymous Coward]

Na na na na na. You are the misogynist. Now nobody want to play with you.

Re:A story of how women were

[gzuckier]

Ouch.

"Bob Harp's memory board worked well, and he recognized that it could serve as a lucrative commercial product. Lacking the time and resources to commercialize it, he put it on the back burner for almost a year. But in 1976, when his wife and Ely were trying to hatch a business, he offered his Altair memory board as a potential product.

As exciting as the opportunity sounded to Lore, computers represented completely foreign territory for both her and Ely (and, for that matter, nearly everyone else on the planet in 1976). Lore recalls: "I called my friend and I said, 'Carole, what do you think about starting a computer company? I have this little 8K RAM board.' She said, 'What’s a RAM board?'""

It get's much, much worse:

"With a good technical underpinning and a focus on style and aesthetics, they knew their boards could stand ahead of the pack. The pair even went so far as to seek out specifically-hued capacitors that would not clash with the other components on their circuit boards. "I don’t know what people thought of us: two females looking for colored capacitors," Ely told InfoWorld in 1982. "But we were interested in what colors went into our boards." "

All in all, it's more of a confirmation of traditional gender roles than it is of breaking through them. Bonus classic permeating theme: gloryless underappreciated innovative techies versus fairly run-of-the-mill wildly successful sales people (yes, I'm biased).

"Those red red orange stripes on those resistors are really garish Let's replace them with resistors with blue white gray stripes."

Re:A story of how women were

[gzuckier]

Then again it seems to be a lot older. From the era of the Altair 8800 so its little wonder I never heard about it.

Now I understand why most Americans can't come to grips with their slavery heritage. All they know is what they read on the internet.

Oh please. That's so untrue. In fact, most of us are completely oblivious to what's on the Internet (which is actually pretty comprehensive on a lot of subjects) except for what we see on Twitter, or maybe Facebook.

Re:A story of how women were

[gzuckier]

I think the article stands on its own as an attempt to show how (insert favorite "oppressed" group) was relevant in major events in history. You can hardly sit through a history course anymore without a somewhat distracting aside explaining that soandso was gay, and/or possibly a woman, or had some mixed heritage etc. While simultaneously trying to explain that history is about critical thinking, and distracting that critical thinking with irrelevant asides, a mixed message is sent.

There's no reason a woman could not have been a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but as it happens, a woman wasn't. Irrelevant housewives in a failed company don't really figure in. The article even points out that there were quite a few attempts at a PC back then, most of which failed when the IBM PC manifested. Even Apple almost did not survive it. I would argue, additionally, that even Apple had next to 0 influence on the PC market, except perhaps in encouraging Windows to exist before it was ready (but ultimately sealing Apple's fate as an also-ran in the PC market). Even very significant companies were destroyed that really did define direction at the time: Sun? SGI? Ironically even IBM is not in the business anymore, and it's big iron division is facing a lot of challenges from what IBM itself created. These were all the significant bits of computer history.

Talking about two housewives in a company that failed before it started is a feel-good story at best, a lame attempt at social justice at worst.

Apple was IBM's R&D department. Just as today they are Android's R&D.

Re:A story of how women were

[gzuckier]

What is it with the idiots who say "SJW" like it's some massive conspiracy or even an insult. Social justice is a good thing, anyone who disagrees has some seriously messed up world views; so fighting for social justice should also be good. The fight over SJW is like that with Gamergate, part of a confusing set of code words that makes sure the outside world will have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

Nihilistic contrarianism is always an easy pose for the know nothing do nothing don't bother me folks.

Bored Housewives

[HideyoshiJP]

I started reading the article, because I usually know how these bored housewife stories on the internet go. Imagine my shock when I got to the end and it was still talking business. Even the man with the porn stache called Adam Osborne didn't lead to anything.

Re:Bored Housewives

[AntronArgaiv]

I started reading the article, because I usually know how these bored housewife stories on the internet go. Imagine my shock when I got to the end and it was still talking business. Even the man with the porn stache called Adam Osborne didn't lead to anything.

Man could ROCK a velour jacket, though :-)

Yeah, good on them for not knowing that starting their own business was something only guys could do.

Re:Bored Housewives

[Bengie]

Captain Zapp Brannigan: You know, boys, a good captain needs abilities like boldness, daring and a good velour uniform[...]

Lore Harp sounds awful

[squiggleslash]

Interesting contemporary commentary here.

It sounds like a somewhat familiar story to most people in tech: the engineers put out decent work and have a decent idea of what's possible and necessary, but are increasingly sidelined by a management that's far too egotistical to believe anyone else might know more than they do, and far too fawned upon to realize that.

See also: Commodore, a far bigger tragedy (S-100 was the Wintel platform of its day, it was never that great a tragedy that it was supplanted by the PC. Commodore, OTOH, was where the innovation was happening. *sigh*)

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, reading that is pretty much like reading about the startup where I work right now. Probably should dust off the ol' resume and try again.

Chilling line:

What makes me so mad many times during staff meeting is when people come up with reasons why something can't be done. I say, 'Why don't you give me just one reason why it can be done?'

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[Registered Coward v2]

It sounds like a somewhat familiar story to most people in tech: the engineers put out decent work and have a decent idea of what's possible and necessary, but are increasingly sidelined by a management that's far too egotistical to believe anyone else might know more than they do, and far too fawned upon to realize that.

Not really. His idea was basically to clone the IBM PC and compete with them; it wasn't some brilliant engineering feat but rather a guess at what it takes to survive. Quite a few vendors tried just that strategy and wound up bankrupt despite their efforts. A number of them ran MS-DOS but just because ether ran that didn't mean a program that would run on an IBM PC would run on the clone unless it was designed to run on the particular variant of MS-DOS the clone used. What all three missed was the only way to compete was try to be different and control your own destiny, like Apple. Even so, it was nor apparent that Apple would survive and other companies that went down that route ultimately didn't. Apple survived because of the brilliance of the two Steves as well as a board that helped guide them through the market.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[Bing Tsher E]

Apple also survived because they ruthlessly attacked all cloners with a pack of lawyers.

Essentially, Apple cleared the way for Windows' ultimate dominance by wiping out all the third party GUI vendors that were competing with Microsoft in that space. The GEM Desktop is one of the shining examples.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[squiggleslash]

Bob Harp (Vector's founding and leading engineer) wasn't simply talking about cloning though, he was essentially telling management:

1. They could product something broadly compatible, they knew how. (The part you picked up on but the important bit was capabilities not direction)
2. The IBM PC announcement meant the S-100 bus was now both technically and from a business point of view obsolete, and thus their entire product line was essentially obsolete.

(2) is the critical one. Bob Harp wasn't just doing some market research here, S-100 was a long-in-the-tooth architecture that was far from leading edge. It was overly expensive to build S-100 based systems, it required substantial computer knowledge from users if they wanted to take advantage of its supposed advantages, and it genuinely didn't offer any advantages over, say, the Apple or IBM approach of a primary motherboard with secondary functionality implemented as plug-in cards. Worse, S-100 had a shelf life, that it was well past. Boards implemented bus widths and clock rates that conformed to standards set in the mid seventies.

If Lore Harp had said "OK, well, maybe we can make a superior third architecture", then yeah, the dismissal of the first point might be easier to take. But Lore Harp apparently refused to listen to Bob Harp's concerns expressed in (2) because LH apparently felt she knew the market better than BH, despite Bob Harp's advice being rather obviously correct on every factual level.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[Anonymous Coward]

Bob was a bit late with his advice/prognostications.

While hindsight is always 20-20, the direction of the market was pretty clear to anyone with sufficient vision (apparently lacking in the people with sufficient pull in that company). The only possible course would be to visualize the next stage in the market, and use to money from the IPO to develop products that could compete in that new market (assuming that it wasn't already too late at the time of the IPO). And even that might have been futile against the resources of a company like IBM.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[squiggleslash]

Absolutely. What Bob said wasn't radical in any way, and management still ignored it. They insisted to the end on producing S-100 based systems, albeit the last model at least was capable, hamfistedly, of also running MS DOS (it wasn't PC compatible however.) Management made no serious attempt to change course or recognize that their entire product line was obsolete, despite it being obvious at the time, and despite their most senior engineers telling them this, and advising them of their capabilities.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[jbolden]

Mod up for that link.

I think Vector is a perfect example of disruptive technology. When they first choose CP/M it was the right choice. They couldn't switch too early from CP/M to a more advanced OS because that would be a downgrade. When more advanced OSes could run the same software they were caught hopelessly behind. Fundamentally Vector didn't own any technology that was unique to it. They had a mostly generic CP/M box with a few tweaks. One of the last CP/M manufacturers. I don't know the system but it wouldn't shock me if they made one of the best business CP/M boxes out there, that's what it takes to become a dominant player. But let's forget that Commodore launched a major price war in 1983 and was driving CP/M machines down to 0. I don't know if Vector could have survived Commodore even if there was no disruption.

Anyway If you look at competitors from the same time period like SGI, HP or Sun you can see there were possibilities up market. Or your example of Commodore, with Amiga or Apple with Mac. Others were able to transition. It clearly was possible to make a box that wasn't an IBM that was successful. They just didn't do much of anything to get there in time.

May 1982 Sun-1 Workstation
Jan 1983 Apple Lisa
Jan 1984 Apple Mac
Early 1985 SGI Iris 1000
July 1985 Amiga 1000

And their engineers had stuff in 1985 on the drawing board which was definitely better than CP/M and moving towards DOS? This wasn't just a failure of executive management. They deserved to die.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[LWATCDR]

Actually it was not Commodore that drove down CP/M prices. That was Osbourne then Kaypro.
Commodore is the the tragedy because Wintel PCs did not really match the Amiga until around 1995. The issue was marketing and expectations.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[fatboy]

Well, it played out something like this

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[squiggleslash]

I think there's a mix of subjects people are talking about here. The GP references Commodore starting a price war circa 1983, which is right, and would have driven down the prices of pretty much all personal computers at that time.

That said... while there were CP/M machines in 1983, they were a dying breed. New S-100 designs were no longer the province of anything other than minor enthusiast supporting businesses. CP/M itself ran on machines like those produced by the two companies you mention, but largely because those were a way to get a cheap portable business machine out the door, at a time when PC compatibility was new and seen as expensive to develop and unlikely to result in a technically successful product.

My reference to Commodore wasn't the price war, but because it too was an example of engineers knowing better than management, with management simply controlled by their own inflated egos. I think Commodore might have survived to the present day (albeit it's hard to imagine a successor to the Amiga that lives up to the latter in the same way as a Mac OS X machine lives up to a Macintosh) had management been willing to listen to its engineers, brought in good marketing, and put into production the utterly awesome machines they had all ready to go.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[LWATCDR]

Actually I knew people buying CP/M machines as late as 85 actually I knew some vertical markets that sold CP/M machines well into the early 90s.
Truth is that MS-DOS was not a lot better than CP/M for many years. It really was not until Lotus 123 and WordPerfect came out that MS-DOS was a lot better than CP/M. That combined with the price drop from the clone makers and you finally had the death of CP/M.
However by 1985 you had the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and the Mac. All of which were far better machines than the IBM intel based PC.
I blame the decline of those machine in part to the magazines of the day. They lived and died by ads so could never say the PC was really outdated. It is simple math. Do you want ads from IBM, Compaq, Kaypro, Corona, Sanyo, and all the rest of the clone makers or do you want ads from just Commodore, Apple, and Atari?
Pushing PCs meant more ads.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[jbolden]

Let me just point out the OSX machines are essentially variants on NeXT. NeXT released their first model spring of 1987 and was working hard on their stuff in 1985. Spring 1987 is probably around the time Vector would have released their 2nd version of the their cool stuff on the drawing board when customers would have had to transition.

Now if you are going to be transitioning in 1987... and the first fully object oriented graphic operating system which has concepts like the web (in primitive form) and email native is out how well does Vector's enhanced CP/M do? A very primitive version of OSX is where the bar would have been for them.

_____

You are right about the 1983 Commodore price war comment, that is what I meant. Commodore is a more complex situation since in the 1990s they were the low end and the grey box makers wanted to go down market. I suspect they could have gone 3rd world, and aimed for computers for $50. Something like the One Laptop Per Child initiative from a decade later . Or they could have been a player like Palm, Danger or BlackBerry were with early handhelds and heck that market now is much bigger than PCs.

I don't know what Commodore was thinking about during the last days. But given that SGI didn't make it...

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[Chris Mattern]

His idea was basically to clone the IBM PC and compete with them; it wasn't some brilliant engineering feat but rather a guess at what it takes to survive. Quite a few vendors tried just that strategy and wound up bankrupt despite their efforts.

True. However, except for Apple, only those who tried that strategy survived. Not everybody who tried that strategy lived, but everybody who lived used that strategy.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[squiggleslash]

Oh I know people who were buying computers that were bundled with CP/M as their primary operating system in 1990. Amstrad made a lot of them. But the S-100 + CP/M combination was dead before 1983. Successful CP/M machines post 1981 were essentially devices that eschewed S-100, and were built at low cost using CP/M for its low resource usage to fulfill particular niches.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[LWATCDR]

Yes I would have to agree that the S100 was on the way out by then.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[davester666]

..and they owned their operating system. This made it very straightforward for Apple to stop them.

IBM also was very interested in suing cloners, but they couldn't stop Bill from selling the cloners licenses to MS-DOS, once [I think it was Phoenix?] the boot-rom was reverse engineered.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[Registered Coward v2]

If Lore Harp had said "OK, well, maybe we can make a superior third architecture", then yeah, the dismissal of the first point might be easier to take. But Lore Harp apparently refused to listen to Bob Harp's concerns expressed in (2) because LH apparently felt she knew the market better than BH, despite Bob Harp's advice being rather obviously correct on every factual level.

While I agree with your points, Harp's solution probably would not have helped save the company. He recognized one part of the problem but it looks like he missed the bigger threat: that CPM was on the way out and thus their ability to differentiate themselves, which had been what made them successful, was going away. Even a better architecture would have been useless in the face of the adoption of MS-DOS; since they would have either had to use a customized version that would have limited compatibility with programs or run the generic version and lose much of the benefit of a better architecture. ThePC market had reached that point where standardization was going to result in a few winners and a lot of losers, no matter what companies tried to do to remain viable.

In short, a combination of market forces and poor decisions, across engineering, marketing, and executive leadership, resulted in them becoming one of the many "Whatever happened to..."stories.

In fairness to them, at that time in history it was hard to tell which companies and OS's would succeed. Given IBM's money and clout in the computer world in the market it was a pretty safe thing to bet on whatever they decided to use, but that also meant you would be competing with a company with vastly greater resources and the ability to buy into any market they wanted by cutting sweetheart deals that small companies could not afford to match.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[squiggleslash]

He recognized one part of the problem but it looks like he missed the bigger threat: that CPM was on the way out and thus their ability to differentiate themselves, which had been what made them successful, was going away

I think he most certainly did recognize that CP/M was on the way out. And as for CP/M (or rather, CP/M + S-100) being used to differentiate themselves, that never happened. Never. Vector Graphics' selling point was that it produced standardized hardware. It had many rivals, all of whom produced machines identical on architecture to their's, varying by style, bundled hardware modules, and bundled software. Their hardware was never a source of differentiation. They could have rebadged Northstar's products and nobody would even have noticed.

In 1980, S-100 + CP/M was Intel + Windows today. Vector Graphics was a Dell or HP of the time, not an Apple.

Vector Graphics didn't differentiate themselves by producing new innovative hardware. They marketed themselves to businesses in a way that other makers of virtually identical hardware, from Altair to Northstar, weren't as savvy with.

IBM's involvement changed the standard from S-100 to the PC. Bob Harp saw that and suggested producing a PC compatible. That would have been one solution. It might have worked. Given that even at the time, the PC was pretty poor value for money, underpowered and expensive to produce, a second option might have been to work on a new architecture, possibly with IBM's rivals. Bob Harp didn't suggest that, and I don't blame him.

But in the end, they didn't just reject Bob Harp's solution, they rejected Bob Harp's recognition there was a problem. They stuck with S-100+CP/M. They even tried S-100+CP/M+MSDOS. They couldn't even accept there was a problem.

Re:Lore Harp sounds awful

[terjeber]

Ultimately Apple survived because a Microsoft in trouble with the government threw them a lifeline.

Wikipedia updates in...

[Anonymous Coward]

...3...2...1.

Stop it. Stop it right now.

[captnjohnny1618]

This is a really cool and interesting piece of computer history that doesn't need a click bait headline. It can and should stand on its own merit. So I say this:

Stop it. Stop it right now. Please stop it? Let's be just a little bit better than the rest of the Internet.

Re:Stop it. Stop it right now.

[captnjohnny1618]

(Although I do realize that the article uses that headline, I'd still prefer to not see it on slashdot).

Re:Stop it. Stop it right now.

[Anonymous Coward]

I felt a bit gibbed when I got to "designed by her husband".

Re:Stop it. Stop it right now.

[Anonymous Coward]

How Two Bored Housewives Created The PC Industry With This One Weird Trick. Management Hates Them!

Re:Stop it. Stop it right now.

[squiggleslash]

Were you hoping it would be the plumber or the pizza delivery guy?

Re:Stop it. Stop it right now.

[idontgno]

I dunno what your criticism is. It's factually accurate, which is (by Slashdot standards) pretty remarkable. In fact, the "bored housewife" angle is actually the primary difference between this story and lots of other "start computer company up in (garage|basement|warehouse) in the late '70s, get stomped flat by IBM in the early '80s" stories.

Is this a SJW thing?

Re:Stop it. Stop it right now.

[Anonymous Coward]

' By 1975, Lore began to feel antsy. She found her talents wasting while her kids spent their days in class and her husband did the 9-to-5 at Hughes. Against this, as with her parents, she rebelled. ''I cannot stand being at home,'' said Lore in a 1983 New York Times article. ''It drives me insane. Everybody thought I was strange because I would not go to the bridge club or have my fingernails done.'''

It's one of the more accurate headlines Slashdot has ever run, I think! Suggesting otherwise, or that it's inappropriate, is MRA bullshit.

Re:Stop it. Stop it right now.

[captnjohnny1618]

Your point is valid. After I made my post, I realized I probably just shouldn't have said anything since the headline of TFA is the exact same and nearly the same phrase is used directly in the article. It's definitely not a SJW thing, women can absolutely be bored housewives, I just LOATHE clickbait.

Whether or not it's factually accurate, the "bored housewife" angle this day in age has a certain connotation when used in internet news that, fairly or otherwise, tends to color how I read an article. I enjoy reading Slashdot because, for a while there, it didn't treat its readers like the idiots who fill out Buzzfeed quizzes all day long.

All in all, my post was a pretty knee-jerk reaction when I probably should've just shut up. Not being able to edit posts or delete them (a good thing really), makes it hard to express that.

Re:Stop it. Stop it right now.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Two Bored 1970s Housewives Helped Create the PC Industry - You Won't Believe What They Did Next"

Re: Women Wedneysday

[Anonymous Coward]

SJW warriors unite brought to you by PAVA, Penis and Vagina accountants.

Valuable lesson learned,

[Anonymous Coward]

never buy the bleeding edge of technology. It was a high tech (for the times) machine but you paid the price, 5K which was a lot of money back in the early 80's. I got lucky and was able to sell my machine (for 1K) to a doctor who needed a backup machine for the office. At least he got a tax write off.

Pre-cambrian computing

[spaceyhackerlady]

Prior to the IBM PC there was enormous diversity in computing. I have some early issues of Byte and the hardware in the ads is all over the place. Most of the names are long forgotten now.

The BBC did Micro Men, a cute (and mostly historically accurate) program about the rise and fall of Acorn, which happened in the same time period. They too got broadsided by IBM, but managed to develop the ARM processor before they imploded.

...laura

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[Bing Tsher E]

Conversely, it wasn't until the IBM PC forced the market to converge on some common defacto standards that the market became something more than a bunch of weird quirky machines that wouldn't work together at all. The only thing binding together the home computer field to any common standard before IBM was RS-232 and that funny tone a 1200 baud modem makes.

Linux wouldn't even exist in a world where there were ten different quirky brands of personal computer all working in different directions. Some would even say Linux wouldn't exist if Microsoft hadn't been forcing so much hardware into early obsolescence back in the mid 90's.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[jedidiah]

Utter hogwash. Linux is a Unix. As such it can run pretty much anywhere because it's designed to be source compatible with itself. All you have to do is port it to another platform.

Linux is very much like CP/M in this respect, something you conveniently ignored.

Linux actually did run on ALL of the early competitors to the PC.

The first actual Linux user I ever met in the flesh ran it on an Atari. Atari even had it's own version of SystemV that it never quite embraced.

In truth, Linux ran on all of the 68K machines and had those machines survived it would be a "unified experience" as much as any individual Linux user would want to make it.

Even now, Linux is moving into ARM servers and hobby machines and it runs in so many embedded systems that you're probably surrounded with Linux machines and don't even know it.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, I loved that programme. Just the idea that Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry might have had a physical altercation in a pub makes the wonderful, quirky British home computer era seem as vivid now as it felt at the time.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[Anonymous Coward]

You are pretend-missing a significant part of Linux's history. Non-x86 support came very much later; cross-platform support wasn't an early objective like it was for NetBSD.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[FranTaylor]

As such it can run pretty much anywhere because it's designed to be source compatible with itself. All you have to do is port it to another platform.

Utter hogwash!!!

Linus Torvalds on Linux:

It's mostly in C, but most people wouldn't call what I write C. It uses every conceivable feature of the 386 I could find, as it was also a project to teach me about the 386. As already mentioned, it uses a MMU, for both paging (not to disk yet) and segmentation. It's the segmentation that makes it REALLY 386 dependent (every task has a 64Mb segment for code & data - max 64 tasks in 4Gb. Anybody who needs more than 64Mb/task - tough cookies). [...] Some of my "C"-files (specifically mm.c) are almost as much assembler as C. [...] Unlike minix, I also happen to LIKE interrupts, so interrupts are handled without trying to hide the reason behind them.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[Anonymous Coward]

And I am guessing that spaceyhackerlady does, in fact, know she is surrounded by linux machines.

Partly because the history of her slashdot comments shows a really deep and nuanced understanding of tech, but mostly simply because she has a slashdot account.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[spaceyhackerlady]

And I am guessing that spaceyhackerlady does, in fact, know she is surrounded by linux machines.

My employers pay me to do cool shit, and we use Linux to do it. Company standard is CentOS, but my personal research/playpen box is Slackware.

FWIW, I've run Linux on x86, 68k, ARM and UltraSPARC. My home computer, the one I actually spend my own money on, is a Mac. It shares desk space with an x86 Linux box and a Raspberry Pi.

...laura

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is not Unix, any more than Windows is Unix. Linux isn't even a BSD. Linux is a kernel, written for 386 compatible microprocessors.

Unix is an operating system developed by Bell Labs / AT&T.

Even FreeBSD, which OSX is (kinda) based on, isn't Unix, as it is based on 4.4BSD-Lite, which was rewritten to eliminate AT&T code.

OSX is registered as a Unix OS, but FreeBSD isn't. Linux is designed to be compliant, but I'm not aware of any version of Linux past or present that has been certified as Unix.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[jbolden]

I agree with your first point about convergence. The Microsoft / Intel / Western Digital Standard for platform (IBM essentially) was a huge deal for hardware standardization.

But I'm not sure about your second point. Linux exists comfortably on dozens of hardwares. Linux is a diverse ecosystem not a monoculture. Why would Linux (or something like it) have not done better if there were 10 quirky brands about? Heck that's pretty much the 1980s workstation market and there is where Unix pretty much evolved from.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[FranTaylor]

certified as Unix.

this certification is obsolete, nobody cares about POSIX or Unix compatibility any more. All of the old Unixes have gone their own way, if you want to run well on them, you have to throw away your POSIX stuff and code directly to each platform.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[Bing Tsher E]

If your favorite 'distro' is slackware, you're just a little work away from an upgrade to NetBSD. Where you have a solid userland all under the same code revision tag, and PkgSrc for everything else.

Not the dogs breakfast that any 'Linux' essentially is.

Linux on 68k, SPARC and ARM? Various dog's breakfast conglomerations that somebody got to work. On NetBSD all those architectures build a kernel and userland from the same tagged codebase.

But if you like muddling around in a different kludge on each architecture, it's all fine. I spent years fooling around with different Unixes on obscure hardware, too. (IRIS, HP-UX, Solaris, etc.)

It's nice to have one OS that works everywhere, not a kernel that kinda works and fifty different dogs breakfast userland kludges.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[Bing Tsher E]

Windows NT 4.0 is certified as POSIX compliant. And I am not just talking about the out-of-the-box rubberstamp POSIX subsystem. You can install INTERIX, which Microsoft bought and branded as 'Services for UNIX' and have a whole POSIX subsystem running on the NT Kernel, in parallel with the Win32 subsystem (not an 'operating environment' wrapped up in a Win32 DLL, which is what cygnus is)

I bought copies of Interix before and after Microsoft bought Softway Systems. I'll admit it was kind of amusing in 2000 to buy a toolchain from Microsoft that included the GNU Compiler.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[Bing Tsher E]

If there had been ten quirky brands of hardware environments to target, there wouldn't have been the critical mass of a hardware install base for the Linux hackers to focus on. The fact that there was an 'industry standard hardware base' in the form of the x86 clone motherboard made it easy for Linux to get a base to run on.

Everybody had an old '486 box to run it on. Many IT operations had old boxes that management had abandoned, for maverick techs to install Linux on. Where it Just Worked (tm)

In the 1980's Unix nearly DIED on the scattered hardware base. That was the biggest cause of all it's problems at the time.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[FranTaylor]

your post illustrates exactly why POSIX certification is not relevant, it has no actual meaning in reality

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[FranTaylor]

In the 1980's Unix nearly DIED on the scattered hardware base. That was the biggest cause of all it's problems at the time.

On the contrary, all of those ports are what made Unix a resilient portable operating system. Today we can easily port Unix to any new architecture, and that's because it enjoyed a period in the 80's (its codebase was much smaller and more pliable back then) when it was being ported left and right to every new computer.

You've got it wrong. Sure most of those old Unix vendors went down in flames, but Unix emerged from the flames as a better product.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[jbolden]

If there had been ten quirky brands of hardware environments to target, there wouldn't have been the critical mass of a hardware install base for the Linux hackers to focus on. The fact that there was an 'industry standard hardware base' in the form of the x86 clone motherboard made it easy for Linux to get a base to run on.

I don't think you are right here in a more general sense. Obviously something like the Linux kernel is a bad choice. But imagine the Linux toolset (i.e. the rest of the operating system) with at worse a slightly more hardware diverse kernel: NetBSD, QNX... Nothing much has to change. Again we know Linux can thrive in that environment, it does now and UNIX before it did, which I'll address below.

Many IT operations had old boxes that management had abandoned, for maverick techs to install Linux on. Where it Just Worked

Sure. And YellowDog Linux "just worked" on PPC hardware. You pick a distribution for your hardware. People would be used to that since that's what they were doing anyway.

In the 1980's Unix nearly DIED on the scattered hardware base. That was the biggest cause of all it's problems at the time.

Died? Huh? That was the highpoint for commercial Linux. Commercial Linux in the 1980s was displacing other systems that had evolved in hardware monocultures because it handled the rapidly evolving workstation / server hardware. Your history is just backwards here.

Now certainly the success of Unix led to some problems that Open Systems needed to address, but that was a problem with success.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[jbolden]

Let me point out most of the Unixes went down in the flames in the mid 1990s, not the 1980s, when the workstation and server market consolidated (around NT and Linux). Unix thrived on diversity.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[Last Warrior]

Linux (what became Slackware) started on the PC and ran exclusively on PC hardware for a very long time before it was ported to anything else. I still have the original floppy disks with that very early code to prove it. Once linux started to gain popularity, then it was ported to other platforms. But this was not for years after linux was running on pc hardware.

Credentials : old guy.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[Darinbob]

IBM didn't do this though. IBM itself got sidelined when they came out with PS2 and it wasn't compatible even with hacks. IBM did not want the clones, period.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[Darinbob]

Linux? Linux was originally on 386 PC clones. You're talking about computers that existed before then. Maybe you're thinking Minix or Xinu or some other Unix lookalike?

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[PhunkySchtuff]

I'll have to watch that docco - After using BBC micros and BBC Model B in primary school, and the Acorn Archimedes in high school, I've followed Arm with a bit of interest. Their rise and fall and then stratospheric rise again from the ashes is an incredible story. By sheer volume, there are probably more ARM cores on the planet than any other architecture - ARM was originally the Acorn RISC Machine and was an incredible processor architecture in it's day (and, through licensing to other fabs, still is pretty impressive for it's performance per watt)

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[Trogre]

Died? Huh? That was the highpoint for commercial Linux. Commercial Linux in the 1980s was displacing other systems that had evolved in hardware monocultures because it handled the rapidly evolving workstation / server hardware. Your history is just backwards here.

Do you mean Unix? Linux 0.01 was released in 1991.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[jbolden]

We were talking about both. GP had said which induced response to what you are quoting, "In the 1980's Unix nearly DIED on the scattered hardware base. That was the biggest cause of all it's problems at the time." He was clearly talking abut big box Unixes in the Workstation era. Which is btw what I was talking about as well the "1980s workstation market"

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[terjeber]

Why would Linux (or something like it) have not done better if there were 10 quirky brands about?

Because Linux was written specifically to learn about the x86 platform (specifically the 386). There was no multi-platform support until much later.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[Bing Tsher E]

POSIX certification of Interix on Windows NT basically means it can compile and run almost anything that will run on the other unixes and freenixes. It's a pretty good cert, to be honest.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[jbolden]

Well obviously in an alternative world where there isn't standardization around the x86 platform Linux's origin needs to change. Low level routines for the various platforms would need to exist. So either you would have cross platform kernels or the distributions exist with different kernels and cross platform standards (i.e. extensions to POSIX) become more important.

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[terjeber]

So, if there was no standardization Linus would have built a cross-platform solution? Why would you think so? How do we even know if he'd be a computer geek?

Re:Pre-cambrian computing

[jbolden]

Well obviously we are talking about an entirely different world. But assuming things are similar enough that we have mostly the same people doing things that are as close as possible while still being sensible .... we have a pretty good idea what would have happened.

Linus had a kernel in Minix which ran fine on x86 hardware but really didn't take advantage / compensate for the peculiarities of x86 hardware. What Linus started doing was making something like the Minix kernel far closer to hardware, far more valuable for a particular platform. That platform was dominant, but nothing much changes if it isn't. The same process happens and you just have something very close to what NeXT did with Mach to make XNU (XNU is the OSX kernel).

We BTW had almost exactly this situation involving this group a few months later with GCC. With GCC they had excellent cross platform support but it was impractical and slow. They took GCC and made it fast and efficient, enough so that GCC also became practical for other platforms (like PPC).

I don't see how much has to fundamentally change in this alternative history. Freeix/Linix/Linux was able to deal with a unified platform and obviously would have evolved differently if there had't been one but I don't see the dependency asserted above regarding a unified platform.

they didnt shape anything!

[Anonymous Coward]

she was selling her HUSBANDS ram board, she didn't understand the business, when IBM entered her HUSBAND wanted to make a PC compatible she said no, so he made another company which outlived that CP/M disaster.

mismanagement by people who never understood the business from the getgo.

And super smooth alienating your cheif engineer without a plan B.

All they were was some lowly clone crap vendor that didn't shape any part of the industry, they just rode the wave into the ground because the CEO had no vision, and no clue as to what she was doing.

Re:they didnt shape anything!

[Anonymous Coward]

They rode the wave far enough to go public, probably at a time when they could read the writing on the wall, and basically rip of the clueless investors who bought their stock. It would be interesting to know if the founders were able to offload their stock at decent prices, or whether various lockup agreements meant that they could not sell their stock until after it tanked.

Re:they didnt shape anything!

[cheesybagel]

From what I get they were good at selling the product. Much of what Steve Jobs was good at. The problem was they had no technical sense of things whatsoever and her husband was the only person there who actually got it.

Steve Jobs might not have be able to do anything by himself but at least he had some technical sense of what was good. Even if he did some design blunders occasionally. He was also smart enough not to kick Woz out in the early days and surrounded himself with strong technical teams.

Re:they didnt shape anything!

[Darinbob]

So with all those mistakes, it's basically like every other business ever.

Some things never change

[Anonymous Coward]

"Meanwhile, Bob Harp felt the media paid too much attention to the fact that Carole and Lore were women, when it was he, in fact, who made the company possible with his hardware designs."

Re:Some things never change

[cheesybagel]

The Woz always gets less attention than the Steve Jobs of this world.

Obligatory SJW propaganda

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, it was Tipper Gore who created the internet. Al just took all the credit.

Re:Obligatory SJW propaganda

[FranTaylor]

tipper gore made rap music popular

Rise of clickbait headlines

[gurps_npc]

There were not two 'bored housewives'. They were entrepreneurs. Calling them housewives is insulting to every entrepreneur everywhere - male or female.

Calling them bored housewives is like describing Einstein's work as "Look what this bored patent clerk came up with..."

We may not be able to kill the clickbait in other headlines, but can we PLEASE stop this crap on slashdot thread titles?

Re:Rise of clickbait headlines

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article text. This supports the headline, despite being a stereotype that is offensive to some.
"We were bored doing the housewife thing," recalls Ely today. "I was ready to be something."

Re:Rise of clickbait headlines

[Jesus_666]

At least it's not: "Typewriter manufacturers hate them! See this one weird device two bored housewives came up with!"

Re:Rise of clickbait headlines

[John Bokma]

Give it a few months...

Re:Rise of clickbait headlines

[gurps_npc]

I am sure Einstein described himself as a patent clerk as well.

Let me ask you a question - have you ever pleasured yourself?

Would you like me to describe you as "Noted Masturbator"? It may be true that you have done it, but it is not an appropriate way to refer to you.

Similarly, they may have described themselves that way - probably after being asked a leading question - but that is NOT a good reason to describe them that way in the headline. Headlines should be the most important part of the story, not the most attention gathering. That's the problem with clickbait.

Re:Rise of clickbait headlines

[Last Warrior]

I can see your point and I don't disagree with it. I don't think that was the point of the headline though.
I imagine the headline was intended to be a reflection of the time in which the company existed.
This is because there was a perception back then that women (ie:housewives) as the cultural roles has pin-holed them into were incapable of working or succeeding in these male dominated roles at the time.

We know that isn't true and those perceptions are not nearly as stark now as we have years and years of shifts in our cultural ideas under our belts since then.
And Vector Graphics definitely had an affect on the PC market at the time that irreparably changed the design and also the notion of the use of PCs. They weren't the only ones to have an affect and the amount of affect they had is debatable. But they most certainly had an affect.

The headline points more to sort of a odd nostalgic look at the 70s and the idea that "Hey look at what these housewives can accomplish."
It would be offensive today to refer to women in the workplace as housewives. A lot of things have changed since the 70s. And for the better.

TLDR; back in the 70's there was a very pronounced perception that housewives were housewives because they were incapable of doing anything else. They were wrong. the headline reflects a retrospective nostalgia of the thinking in the 1970s.

Re:Rise of clickbait headlines

[Darinbob]

Aren't male entrepreneurs just bored men without the actual skills to get a real job?

Re:Rise of clickbait headlines

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

I am sure Einstein described himself as a patent clerk as well.

Let me ask you a question - have you ever pleasured yourself?

Would you like me to describe you as "Noted Masturbator"? It may be true that you have done it, but it is not an appropriate way to refer to you.

I am pretty adamant on that point--call me Master Masturbator, or expect a strongly worded letter from my attorney!

Re:Rise of clickbait headlines

[Anonymous Coward]

Housewife is an insult? You should try it sometime. I look forward to hearing you whine about the hours, the lack of respect, the lack of pay / pension / healthcare, etc.

Hi sexconcker (1179573)

[ciaran2014]

Hi user:sexconker (1179573), we know it's you, you forgot to check the "Post Anonymously" box earlier:

http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

CASU Electronics

[trevc]

Interesting read. Early in my career ('83 to '85 I think) I worked for a company in England called CASU Electronics. Similar story - S100 based systems running CP/M that lost out in the end to the IBM PC.

Re: Women Wedneysday

[Anonymous Coward]

lol :D

Gates & Jobs were housewives?

[j33px0r]

I always thought they were a little effeminate!

Not clickbait.

[DerekLyons]

It's not clickbait - it's the sexism everyone here claims is absent from the tech industry.

Re:Not clickbait.

[jandrese]

Sexism absent from the tech industry? Where have you been seeing those claims? Because there are a lot of articles, many of which have appeared on Slashdot, talking about exactly the opposite.

Re:Not clickbait.

[DerekLyons]

Before you berate me for not reading the articles (which I have), you should actually read my reply.

dozens of such companies in 1970s

[peter303]

I went to the First West Coast Computer Fair and to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Homebrew Computer Club. It was a lot like mobile apps are now or dot.coms in the mid-1990s- many companies vying to succeed.

I thought the Radio Shack TRS-80 was best poised to succeed at the time since it was from an established company. But the killer app that propelled Apple was VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. Many businesses wanted an Apple-2 then.

Commodity hardware from Dell and Compaq and a generic operating system like PC-DOS eventaully consolidated the industry and wiped out most of the small operators.

Slashdot is hijacked by SJWs and corporate scum

[virens]

I have had enough of this shit. Time to leave.

Re:Slashdot is hijacked by SJWs and corporate scum

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably would have been leaving anyway.

Re:Slashdot is hijacked by SJWs and corporate scum

[Anonymous Coward]

Good. we don't need your bigotry around here

Re:Slashdot is hijacked by SJWs and corporate scum

[Darinbob]

Good, we're tired of you bringing up your jihad against SJW every chance you get. Reddit used to have places for you, not sure where you can go now though.

Re:Slashdot is hijacked by SJWs and corporate scum

[Anonymous Coward]

A "jihad" against radicals? Funny, that.

Re:Slashdot is hijacked by SJWs and corporate scum

[gzuckier]

I have had enough of this shit. Time to leave.

Suburban Jewish Wives? "Why Mrs. Moskovitz, I do believe you're trying to seduce me".

What what it's worth

[Anonymous Coward]

There are bits in the article that would go contrary to the usually SJW talking points.

For example:

"When asked in a 1981 interview why she did not specifically hire more women at Vector, Lore remarked that she hired whomever was best for the job, regardless of sex.

Today, Lore says she never encountered significant opposition from men in the industry. When she heard rumors of the the term "ice maiden" used to describe her, she took the name-calling as a sign of her effectiveness and moved forward."

What I see here is that the women who did make it in to tech, such as Lore, don't go around looking to be offended or victimized. Upon hearing rumors of calling her "ice maiden", she just took it in stride as a sign that she's doing something right.

Contrast that to today's feminists, who wants us to "ban bossy", and take being called an SJW as a sign to be doing something right

What a load of crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of people failed.

And with that, Slashdot is booed out

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does somebody always have to bring tomatoes... runs out

Re:Happy Hump Day from The Golden Girls!

[CWCheese]

Credit to Andrew Gold, an extraordinary musician and songwriter, departed too early in 2011

Women Have Been Here Since the 1st Vacuum Tube

[christoofar]

I loved this story from the era of Byte. Most of my penile-brethern in the industry are not old enough to be connected to the earlier eras of computing where women were far more involved in the process. Not just the hardware, but also in software.

It is Grace Hopper who was among the early pioneers to crystallize the idea of a high level computer language (COBOL), and unlike a lot of other languages that have come and gone, COBOL is still around and much of Western civilization still depends on it, hidden away in the logic of CICS transactions. The role of women in computing was actually a lot more involved in its early years than now. To sell very expensive mainframes to corporations, ad men had to sell the idea that the machines were easy to use and took advantage of the "WOMEN R DUMB" stereotype by involving women nearly everywhere around the system from the operator console down to the armies of women driving IBM 029 card punch machines to enter lines of text in "files" of punched cards. System brochures nearly always featured women at the terminals, loading the tapes and pouring through printouts. That legacy showed itself again when the Y2K crisis hit and there was a sudden desperate urge to find COBOL programmers. I remember departments filled with nothing but old-hat ladies who still remembered how to set up their JCL and editing their "job cards" [IBMspeak for 'lines of text'] to test date-fixed code. Seated nearby was a team C++ where if there were 100 of them, perhaps only 1 would be female. The C++ males, all in their 20s, were working on cheap PCs. The grandma coalition next door had control over a Sysplex beast with a $2 million dollar lease in a center with its own air conditioning plant.

When CompSci took off, computing was a new, unknown science to laypeople and it was sexy and exciting, much like biochem is now to girls who are being woo'd at to pursue a major in STEM. Women filled jobs as cryptoanalysts and manually programmed sorting machines with jumper plugs. Women dominated the role of the Systems Analyst, a job type that's still with us and is a role that many women still fill. In many fields of business, women still dominate user communities as women still outnumber men as users of tech.

The problem that exists right now is that there's not a lot of women who are writing instructions to feed into a compiler. I'm in a skyscraper with over 30 floors and I think I can count on one hand the number of women right now who are churning out code and with two hands the number who are debugging and syncing repos to GitHub.

Back when society was far more unkind to women, women had far more influence in tech than they do now. Now that there are legal protections, women have been enticed by recruiters into other sciences (there's a lot more women studying Chemistry than CompSci). The problem today isn't with some perceived gender barrier, or a glass ceiling. The problem is that male programmers haven't had any inclination to walk up to women that they know, show them what they do, how creative programming and system architecture can be, and that it's potentially lucrative and exciting.

STEM conferences only do so much, and nobody gives a rat's ass what celebs and pandering politicians have to say. It's really the folks who actually code day-in day-out who could help get more women back into a field they used to be in with far more gusto.

Re:Women Have Been Here Since the 1st Vacuum Tube

[Anonymous Coward]

... show them what they do, how creative programming and system architecture can be ...

Isn't that the point of all the 'girls can code' social justice programs?

... get more women back into a field ...

You mean a field with no unions, unstable working hours, controlled by follow-the-numbers managers and sales reps driving the software 'engineering process'?

How dare women choose medicine and chemistry instead.

SJW propaganda

[Anonymous Coward]

America announces the next major bank note will have a woman on the design, and only then worries about finding someone suitable. Jewish State operation Google (currently in the middle of a TRILLION dollar project to build robotic 'autonomous' 'tanks' for the US war Machine so America will be more likely to invade targets like Iran) is financing SJW propaganda like this story on Jewish state outlets like Dice and any under the control of Soros, Murdoch, etc.

The REAL history of the PC is Intel inventing the first modern CPU, Intel fragmenting into a myriad of other CPU start-ups providing the astonishing growth of CPU alternatives in the USA (6800, 6502, Z80 etc), and young males building the hardware and software solutions around these accessibly priced computing chips. No significant woman designed the early CPUs and no significant woman designed any aspect of the home-build kits that kick-started the whole PC revolution.

When ASICs gave the THIRD generation of home PCs their astonishing sound and graphics capabilities, it was young males designing the chips at the heart of Atari, Commodore and then the first gaming consoles.

Most of these young males gained their skills ON THEIR OWN- frequently at home- by building their own computers and doing their own research. NOTHING in theory or practice- prevented young females from doing the same thing. Modern tech REMOVED the need for formal business or societal approval. Desire and enthusiasm and talent was ALL any young man needed at the time. For whatever reasons, these properties were NOT found in young females of the time- and this is a FACT.

SJW's, in the employ of Google, set about an Orwellian RE-WRITING of history. Freaky irrelevances suddenly become a "key part of PC history" when a female name is found. Google pays the colourful PSEUDO-factual writers of America's chattering classes magazines to spin yarns about the 'significance' of these non-entity females, simply because they are females.

The next stage is to build them into the text-books on the history of Computer Science, while down-playing the true heroes of the first PC age as 'weird' 'sick' 'mentally ill' 'loners' who were only acclaimed in the first place because a 'lying' 'patriarchy' 'dishonestly' described the history of the computer in the 70s and 80s. The kids expected to swallow this guff are far enough removed from the real history that they don't have any first hand experience of the truth.

History is the LIES written by the VICTORS. Google intends that today's SJWs will be tomorrows 'VICTORS'- and if we allow Google (and Dice) to get away with this, in 50 years time the official story about the rise of the PC in the 70s and 80s will be a 100% SJW lie.

Re:SJW propaganda

[Darinbob]

Are you still mimeographing your newsletter? I'd like a copy.

Not the games company

[Trixter]

Poop, I read the headline and thought it was about Vector Grafix, Ltd., the early 3-D games company (ie. the "3-D wireframe Star Wars" company). I would have definitely loved a retrospective on that, especially how they were able to do 3-D on limited hardware in the 1980s.

I was thinking about it the other day...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jobs once conjured up an image of the incoming entry of IBM in the PC business as if a heavy metal door was closing and Apple had to run to get in before it locked shut (IIRC that was in reference to an Star Wars scene).

These days, the many troubles through which IBM is passing made me remember that struggle and how -- oh, the irony -- Apple not only survived but, after going thru its own share of tribulations, came to be one of (if not the) most-valued companies in the world.

Could Apple buy IBM now?

That simple question would make me the target of laughing by everyone back then. And now it's kinda obvious to anyone.

Annie

[Ultracrepidarian]

Was I the only one who would check out the Godbout ad for this? https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

An Ode to the Vector 3, I miss thee

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Built like a brick shithouse. Aluminum frame. Massively stable power supply with over-spec'd transformer and giant electrolytic. Gold plating on everything that mattered (yes many in that day did not). Rugged S-100 backplane with plenty proper reinforcement to the frame, which in the days of S-100 when routine maintenance was important, was key. Some of us remember the days when you could insert and remove components from computer systems without making the whole machine scooting around like a puppy avoiding a bath.

A B&W memory mapped display that was extremely stable and flicker free even when the whole screen was blinking, which involves massive spikes in CRT current. Screen refresh was smooth. In those days most computer displays failed what I called the 'blink test', where you fill the display with blink/reverse type and watch the characters in the corners. On a black/white blink they would tend to shift position a little. Vector's did not. Beautiful Cherry keyboard, keys metal spring-squishy with a firm stop and perfect debounce which was handled in software by the 'monitor' (=BIOS).

This made Vector's own CP/M word processing software MEMORITE one of the most amazing tools for a secretary to become accustomed to. It may be hard to believe but once upon a time, word wrapping and shifting paragraphs on the screen as you type usually was a flickery, clunky process. Some early word processors even delayed reformatting until you left off typing or ended a paragraph, to minimize the jarring flicker and redraw. When you typed into MEMORITE individual words repositioned themselves to smoothly you actually had a mental impression of them moving as if they were real objects. This simple phenomenon was unprecedented in those days of 4Mhz Z80, even in machines with memory mapped display.

When people who used Vector 3 and MEMORITE were forced to migrate to 'newer, better' PC-compatible word processing platforms running WordPerfect and MSWord, they felt as if they had lost a friend. One secretary who found the Vector Graphic to be the only machine who could keep up with her typing without losing characters or making the screen into an unwatchable flicker-fest, had to transition to MSWord on early Windows. She asked me, "Are things going to get worse from now on?"

Maintaining Vector Graphic machines gave my own career a great start. But it was also a curse. Now I'm more conscious and outspoken of crappy engineering than most other people.

Re:An Ode to the Vector 3, I miss thee

[rayklassen]

I got to play with one of these units, then already long obsolete, in college and frankly, I loved it. A multi user 8 bit microprocessor system with the memory constraints of the time (every user gets their own memory board) is impressive in the extreme...

Wait a minute

[gzuckier]

Isn't this the story arc for season two of Halt and Catch Fire?

I remember Vector Graphics, but not this:

[Ulric]

"As usual, Lore Harp McGovern remained fearless: her very next venture pioneered a disposable device that allowed women to urinate standing up."