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

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: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?

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.

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

[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.