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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.
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.
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.
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.
I'll just leave this quote from the second paragraph of the article here: "a PC designed by Lore's husband, Bob Harp."
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
...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.
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
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
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.
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).
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).
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.