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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.
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*)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.