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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.
she was selling her HUSBANDS ram board, she didn't understand the business, when IBM entered her HUSBAND wanted to make a PC compatible she said no, so he made another company which outlived that CP/M disaster.
mismanagement by people who never understood the business from the getgo.
And super smooth alienating your cheif engineer without a plan B.
All they were was some lowly clone crap vendor that didn't shape any part of the industry, they just rode the wave into the ground because the CEO had no vision, and no clue as to what she was doing.
I'll just leave this quote from the second paragraph of the article here: "a PC designed by Lore's husband, Bob Harp."
This XKCD sums it up rather well actually...
People are quick to assign characteristics of an individual to a group to whom the individual belongs. Look at how often an individual with a characteristic that isn't of the majority is aked their opinion as if it represents that of the minority to whom they are a part. Unfortunately it's also inaccurate. If Mike asks Johnny, who's a nerd, if he likes pizza, and Johnny replies no, he doesn't like pizza, Mike might draw the conclusion that nerds don't like pizza, even when it may only be Mike that doesn't like pizza, or even something as simple as Mike can't process dairy, so he can't eat the stuff even if he wants to.
I think you're also misusing Social Justice Warrior, which I think means someone otherwise-unaffected by the injustice that acts as a self-appointed mercenary and doesn't coordinate their efforts with those who actually are affected by the injustice either. They think they're doing good, and for all we know many may actually be doing good, but at the same time if they're not consulting those affected by the injustice and acting in-concert with those people's movements and leadership then they might actually cause more harm than good if they make the movement itself visibly look bad.
As to your other point, about, "neckbeards and mouthbreathers that are programmers you would know that they're hostile to everybody," this is actually more true than a lot of people realize. There are cases where women have perceived behavior in the workplace to be hostile toward them, when in reality they're actually being treated the same as the men are treating each other; in-effect they have been accepted as, "just one of the guys," but they don't realize that the guys treat each other like crap and now they're just getting the same as everyone else gets. Certainly that's not all cases of workplace harassment, but I have seen it first-hand and usually it's the result of the entire workplace degenerating, and companies end up cracking down on it in strange ways, like with uniforms, work-area inspections, and other things that simply keep employees too busy to harang each other. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the employer structurally reorganizes instead.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
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
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.