Slashdot Mirror
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.
So let's create our own, damnit!!
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.
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.
(Although I do realize that the article uses that headline, I'd still prefer to not see it on slashdot).
SJW warriors unite brought to you by PAVA, Penis and Vagina accountants.
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.
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
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.
"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."
Instead of making obnoxious remarks, why don't you actually read the article?
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.
Lore was the proverbial Jobs or Gates of that particular enterprise.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Were you hoping it would be the plumber or the pizza delivery guy?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Hold on now! Lets not get all radical and crazy! Honestly, it was a response to the clickbait headline and current milieu.
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
You don't seem to understand how slashdice works...
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
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?
Hi user:sexconker (1179573), we know it's you, you forgot to check the "Post Anonymously" box earlier:
http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
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.
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.
...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.
Men are more likely to find a light amount of hazing to be socially bonding.
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.
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.
tipper gore made rap music popular
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.
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.
I always thought they were a little effeminate!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Credit to Andrew Gold, an extraordinary musician and songwriter, departed too early in 2011
Have a Day!
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?
I don't have points, but this AC needs some upvotes.
...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.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
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.
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.
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
I think (at least in my case) that it is simply below my give-a-crap threshold.
Are you still mimeographing your newsletter? I'd like a copy.
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.
I bow my head in shame.
'gets'
I meant 'gets'.
The most dangerous drug
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.
Before you berate me for not reading the articles (which I have), you should actually read my reply.
Is this your first time on slashdot?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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?
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?
Was I the only one who would check out the Godbout ad for this? https://www.flickr.com/photos/...
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.
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.
Be seeing you...
We call those "Management" and we speak ill of them when they are not around.
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.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Isn't this the story arc for season two of Halt and Catch Fire?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
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".
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
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."
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
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.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
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.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
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.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
"As usual, Lore Harp McGovern remained fearless: her very next venture pioneered a disposable device that allowed women to urinate standing up."