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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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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
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.
...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.
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.
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.
Are you still mimeographing your newsletter? I'd like a copy.
The most dangerous drug
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>