I find the headline to be promise more than it delivered.
A women had a husband (Bob) who was a genius at design and
developing hardware accessories and later a full computer.
He had little interest in running the business.
His work created a hardware company called Vector Computers.
His wife and another woman ran the business aspect of the company
and the company did well.
It did well thanks to the husband's identification of a huge market that
offered a lot of opportunity.
The company grew and this is certainly a credit for the two female executives.
They were pioneers both as female executives and within getting in early in the
computer industry.
Once Bob learned about this soon to be released IBM PC he requested and begged
the company to start making IBM PC clones and accessories.
He said the company had a year left unless it started embracing the PC
The now soon to be ex wife rejected this idea and kept the company running
the same as always. She also fired her soon to be ex-husband.
She did take the company public within that year and was generous allotting
stocks to every employee in the company. That was also a first.
I hope everyone sold their stock as soon as they could, given that the company
died 2 years later. Because they are failed to adapt to a changing market
and rejected advice of the technical founder and the guy who identified the
market segment they started in.
Now take this story and replace the wife with Steve Jobs and the husband with Woz. It’s basically the same.
Jobs also rejected the advice of the technical co-founder in various matters, and insisted on staying away from producing IBM compatibles. In the end it worked out for Apple but not for Vector.
With a different roll of the dice, it might have been the other way around. Luck plays a huge role in startup success.
> In the end it worked out for Apple but not for Vector.
Did it? It very nearly did not.
Unlike Vector, Steve Jobs always had a focus on something very special in mind: the very best design, of course (perhaps similar to the Vector CEO), but, more importantly, technical things that would re-define the industry, like windowed OS's and mice.
And, even that relentless focus on having the best user experience was not enough to save Apple! The only thing that did save Apple was bringing Steve Jobs back, who immediately did the only thing he could. In a stroke of sheer genius (and/or luck), he wrangled a huge investment out of... Bill Gates, who was probably the name most associated with PC compatibles!
The Vector story has none of these attributes, except for the nearly (or completely) going out of business part.
Based on this article, Lore Harp of Vector doesn’t seem so different from Steve Jobs. She also prioritized design and ease-of-use. She also was an industry outsider with enough charisma to reach national magazine covers.
It’s not like Jobs invented GUIs himself — he happened to be in the right place to learn about all the work already done at Xerox and bring it home. If things had been slightly different, maybe it would have been Lore Harp who went to PARC instead.
The personality cult around famous founders is 99% selection bias. Sure, they were talented. So were hundreds or thousands of others in the same industry.
> and insisted on staying away from producing IBM compatibles
That didn't turn out well for them in the end since they eventually had to build machines 90% similar to IBM PCs that were still able to run Windows in a VM, just so they wouldn't become obsolete after the G5 fiasco.
So I'm not sure how you can conclusively claim that "it worked out for Apple".
> Once Bob learned about this soon to be released IBM PC he requested and begged the company to start making IBM PC clones and accessories. He said the company had a year left unless it started embracing the PC
> The now soon to be ex wife rejected this idea and kept the company running the same as always. She also fired her soon to be ex-husband.
How do you look at the technical person putting it together and just disregard everything they are saying? When my non-technical persons bring forward a good idea or a good suggestion, we tend to weigh it versus previous ideas and market outlook...
So it's actually "How two bored 1970s housewives had no impact on the PC industry"? Because the decision to not build an IBM PC clone meant that IBM PC won, and the alternative decision to build an IBM PC clone would have meant that IBM PC clone would have also won? The only difference seems to be the fate of this particular company, not the PC industry.
"Helped create" is accurate. S-100 and CP/M systems like those from Vector Graphic ruled the nascent PC industry in the 1970s before the rise of motherboard-based systems like the Apple II, and DOS started life as a CP/M clone, with largely compatible system call numbers. Even the Apple II ended up running CP/M as well via Microsoft's (!) Softcard.
Perhaps it's a bit like giving deserved credit to Al Gore for (among other things) the Supercomputer Network Study Act and the High Performance Computing and Communications act, as well as the "information superhighway" term.
I wonder if it would have been possible, as the article suggests, for more of the S-100 and CP/M companies to move to ISA and DOS (and x86) while keeping prices competitive with IBM and Apple?
If they sold the stock, it would just be passing the loss onto the new buyers. In the grand scheme of things it would not reduce the net amount of suffering, but only transfer it to someone else.
It’s not the same. The seller in this case is someone who worked for the company for years and received the shares as compensation. The buyer is probably a fund or a speculator.
Startup employees should never feel bad about selling their stock. The opportunity is rare enough.
Thank you for the TLDR, as soon as I opened the site on mobile and was greeted with uncloseable video ads and a tiny area of screen real estate to actually read the article, I closed it down.
You should read the article, this is an uncharitable tldr. I’d always Heard about s100 and cpm but I didn’t realize there was this category of high priced business computers like the vector in the story.
I'm sure this will get downvoted since its not PC (pun intended), but I feel like the title should read "Two Bored 1970's Housewives, and an engineer Husband, Helped Create the PC Industry." The wives had the time and desire, and the husband had the skill and idea[1], just not the time or risk tolerance. I don't see how these can be separated, considering he was the Chief Engineer and created most of the products too. [2]
[1] "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".
[2] "Losing the engineer who had designed almost all of its hardware products since 1976 was a huge blow for Vector."
You don't understand the purpose and value of headlines. "An engineer husband" is not essential to hook readers into the story. His contribution wasn't ignored in the actual article.
I don't see how these can be separated, considering he was the Chief Engineer and created most of the products too. [2]
It's pretty easy to separate them. You just write an article about one part of the story. Not every article or story on a subject is required to be 100% comprehensive.
Bob Harp is featured in the article prominently, so I'm not sure how it can be "potentially misleading" as to his role.
The whole point of this article is to highlight what was different about this situation. Bob Harp's contribution wasn't particularly unique! There were lots of highly competent engineers in the early PC industry doing stuff like this. Read Stan Veit's book or "Fire in the Valley" if you want more than you'll ever need to know about them.
The kind of management talent that declined to build IBM PC hardware at exactly the time when it could have given them massive competitive advantage over companies making a similar mistake?
That mistake came later, after the company was already extremely successful. Left up to the engineer alone, there wouldn't have been a company to fail.
A colleague of mine got started programming because her fancy sewing machine was programmed using Cobol or Fortran.
It's really fun to hear stories about when she quite literally just started showing up at Oslo University to sneak into classes because she found it so fun.
Now she's maintaining one of our mainframes at work. Extremely knowledgeable and kind. The kind of person you feel lucky to know.
All of the lectures at UiO are actually open to anyone as far as I know. You don’t need to be a student there or anything. You can just walk right in. And as long as you are quiet, and the room is not too full, I think it’s ok.
But considering how inexpensive university education is in Norway, it may be an even better idea to sign up for classes because then you get to deliver assignments and get them graded and so on.
Then again, when I attended university at UiO a lot of the intro classes were not inspiring. (And the same is probably true for most any university I think.) And I ended up not finishing my degree at UiO. So going to some lectures for the topics that you find the most interesting instead of enrolling as a student may not be such a bad idea either.
One of the things I enjoyed the most about my time at UiO was this student union that was there. Lots of really skillful people were members of that student union and I learned quite a bit from some of them. I spent a lot of time in the location of that student union.
In fact I can probably say, honestly, that I spent more time in that student union than I did in classes. Other members of that student union was also how I got to know about HN originally. This was over a decade ago now.
It was a special place, and I am so happy that it existed and that I got to experience it.
The building that we had our location in was eventually decommissioned and we got new location in a basement without windows. This killed the student union. No one wanted to hang out in a room deep down in a basement with no windows. And this new location was very inaccessible too, you had to walk through many corridors down in the basement to get to the room.
Some of the people that had been doing the most for that student union started a new hacker space in Oslo. I’ve only been to the new hacker space a couple of times but it’s a pretty nice place too I think.
The website of the student union continued to run on a server at UiO for several years after activity stopped, but the server went down a while back. I guess either the University Center for Information Technology (USIT) at UiO did a cleanup in the server rooms and found no one to speak to about the server, or they were informed that the student union was inactive, or the hardware in the server may have just malfunctioned after years of operation.
Around 1983 my Eagle Scout project was to get computers for students at the Elementary School I had attended in central California. One of the companies that presented their systems was Vector.
Their demo was the first time I got to play with an S-100. I remember they sent a woman from their corporate offices and an African American salesperson to talk to me. That meeting always shaped for me an expectation of diversity in the workplace.
Looking back, I wonder if the woman at the demo was Lore or Carole
Vector was too expensive for my project. I did end up getting three Apple ][‘s for student use and a HeathKit CP/M system for the office. The school ended up being the first elementary school in the school district to give students access to computers.
Similar story in the UK, "Freelance Programmers" was created with the primary workforce of mothers with a technical background.
The creator of the company, (now Dame) Stephanie Shirley, wrote about it in her memoirs "Let it Go", which I can recommend.
They eventually had to hire men, due to equality legislation. The attraction for women, however, was that they could work from home. Seems we have come full circle.
The compatibility comment in the article was interesting. There was definitely a period when bug for bug PC compatibility was not widely appreciated by a lot of companies because it hadn't historically been a thing. Even Corona had a weird one-off monochrome graphics mode that basically no one supported (and made it incompatible with add-on graphics cards like Hercules).
I think it's also easy for people to forget that in, say, 1982 if you were shopping for a computer a PC clone wasn't necessarily the obvious choice.
> “We were bored doing the housewife thing,” recalls Ely today. “I was ready to be something.”
I find it interesting how it's generally acceptable for women to insult other women who choose to devote their time to raising a family. I mean, I get her point but the quote above is demeaning as hell.
Since that's not likely to end anytime soon, I suppose it'd be funny to see the insults fly in the other direction. Like, stating how "working moms" are kidding themselves that they have a full mother-child relationship. They've out-sourced a critical and singular relationship to paid employees (the nanny -- assuming their spouse also works). They don't know what's going on in their kids' lives, they don't know who in school is bullying them, they don't know which kids are getting into drugs, they only know the very surface of what their kids are dealing with. They're lying to themselves to think they can both kick ass at work and as a parent. They sacrificed precious childhood years of emotional, mental, and life guidance, in exchange for their paycheck.
None of the above is cool to say. But it's definitely OK to demean in the other direction.
Disclaimer: I'm a male parent, working full-time, wife quit her job when kids were born. She has never regretted the decision, and is always super busy and never "bored." And me, I know 100% there's an experience I've sadly forever missed of spending time with my kids, especially pre-WFH.
It's completely and totally socially acceptable to tell women they are basically abusing their children by choosing to go to work whereas so-called "stay at home moms" are hailed as heros. Staying home to raise children is considered "real work." If you are female you are not "allowed" to find spending all day at home young children anything but hard work that's incredibly fulfilling.
People lost their god-damned minds and there was profuse apologies when a Hillary Clinton rep made the accurate statement that “Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life." You would think she was called a serial killer with how people reacted.
(Not to mention the quote from the article you took offense to wasn't even actually demeaning, people state their preferences all the time. Nobody gets uppity and offended when someone says, for example, "I don't want to be chained to a desk all day," which is a common preference people state. Your offense at a non-offensive statement basically reinforces that a woman with young children isn't "allowed" to state that they desire to be away from their children to participate in the workforce - stating that preference is literally offensive.)
I suppose it's that deriding stay-at-home parents is commonly and socially acceptable (in media, articles like this, etc), more so than in the other direction. I can't think of an example, e.g. in media or press, where the working mother is ridiculed.
But anyway, it's a matter of perspective, I suppose, and which social bubble one inevitably inhabits.
No, it's 100% NOT socially acceptable to tell a so-called "stay at home mom" that she's anything less than a hero who's the best person ever (even if she doesn't actually do very much all day). Working outside of the home is very much looked down upon as something unfortunate that one has to do.
Coming out and actually admitting that you desire to go to work rather that you have to is incredibly socially unacceptable for a woman. This sort of statement might even get CPS called on you if the wrong person overhears it.
This wasn't so much the case 15 years ago, we have turned into a society of child worshipers.
You're right: "In the first season of the TV series, Halt and Catch Fire, a fictional drama depicting the birth of the personal computer industry in the 1980s, the pivot of company Cardiff Electric resembles both the history of Corona Data Systems and Compaq." [0]
(Corona Data Systems was co-founded by Robert Harp)
I've been hoping for a Silicon Valley style dramedy series about the early days of open source. My headcasting for this has Donal Logue as Richard Stallman, Nick Offerman as Eric Raymond, and Cory Michael Smith as Linus.
I'd love to see a dramatization of the making of the Macintosh. I read Revolution In The Valley not too long ago and it's fascinating to read about the personalities of the people who created that machine. I think it would be a nice compliment to Halt and Catch Fire--a Mac version to their PC-Compatible show.
Sure, but when it's the fourth or fifth treatment about the relatively recent founding of a single company that is still dominant in the present day, and that treatment is sponsored by the company in question, it comes off as self-serving.
> Lore and Carole’s emphasis on visual aesthetics led them to offer this choice of colors at a time when many companies gave little thought to what their computers looked like
Looking at their designs in the article, they just ooze cool.
The comments below about Apple, Wozniak, Jobs, et al are right. Those stories have been done to death. There were a lot of other people not at Apple who were making fun, vital contributions to the PC industry, and I'm working on a post about another one that almost no one remembers (teaser).
A Silicon Valley legend was Dennis Barnhart [1], who crashed the Ferrari that he'd bought with his IPO money for Eagle Computer (remember them? I thought not.)
> Vector’s board convinced Lore to return as president and CEO. She began commuting over with an 800-mile round trip every day from her home in San Francisco.
Back then, there was no TSA screening process that took 1-2 hours of waiting in line, planes were smaller, airports were less busy, flights left on time whether they were full or not, and you could smoke on the plane.
It would have been pretty expensive unless she or the company negotiated some kind of discount with the airline but lots of people today quite regularly commute 2 hours or more one-way in their car or on the train, so...
Oh my god I completely forgot about stuff like the NY - DC shuttle. You could show up at LGA, walk up to the counter and buy a ticket for a flight that ran once an hour and be in the air literally within minutes.
The last time I remember it being that easy was probably 9/13/2001. An ex-girlfriend was trying to get to DC from MSP because her father worked in the Pentagon and she hadn't heard from him. She called me from the airport in a panic at 2AM asking for help because her credit card was declined. I drove to the airport, groggily handed the ticket agent my card and drove back home. She was probably on the plane before I got home.
Airline flights for the day are a frequent part of my book [1] which takes place in roughly the same time frame and geography. It wasn't really 400 air miles from LA to SF, but chalk that up to hyperbole. I used to leave the house in Hawthorne at 7:15 for an 8:00 flight from LAX, believe it or not.
The other poster mentions that you could smoke on the plane (in the back rows) and that was true, disgustingly enough.
I remember getting stuck in the smoking section once or twice in the bad old days. I begged the flight attendants to find someone who would switch seats with me.
There are a lot more stories like this that would be great to unearth, rather than continuing to focus on the Jobs/Wozniak story. Much as I did love my ][!
I hope some of the retrotech youtubers create showdown of Vector computer (or S-100 based machine in general). There seems to be one demo[0], "vector graphics" is too generic search term.
> The only consumer PC company that survived into the 1990s with its own significant platform was Apple, and even then, just barely.
Commodore was probably still "significant" in 1990.
Acorn's platforms were fairly successful into the 1990s, and of course you can still run RISC OS (first released in 1994) today on a modern Raspberry Pi!
On the hardware architecture side of course, ARM has simply taken over the world - including Apple.
I agree with you, but shall we change that to "parenthood"? Since we might as well push back against the stigma against the father being the one who raises the children instead of pursuing a career.
As a stay-at-home homeschooling father, I experienced that stigma very briefly a decade ago, but it seemed to die a sudden death shortly after 2010. I've felt nothing but encouraged since. I think it's something that you'd expect from the outside, but doesn't really show up in practice.
Teachers would have more recognition and status if there were concrete evidence that their methods are effective and based on reproducible research.
Is there a 10x teacher or even a 2x teacher? Surely there is, but how would we know?
In Asian cultures a handful of teachers make a million dollars a year because they do test prep: it's easy to tell when their students pass or fail the big test. The most successful ones are treated by parents and test-takers as A-list celebrities, or even beyond that. They'd sooner swoon meeting Gwen Lee than Scarlett Johansson.
But if you're teaching something harder to gauge, like "writing" or physical education, then it's hard to know if you're a 2x teacher or a 0.5x teacher. And you can't point to your research-backed methodology, because everybody else's methodology is also research-backed (n=22, observed over 3~6 weeks, as usual).
The people who raise the next generation should have recognition and status if they're doing a good job. Are they? Would any random person off the street be doing an equally good job? We don't really know.
Teachers teach thousands of students at a minimum over their careers. Surely this can be measured. If nobody is doing it it’s because of either teachers unions, other bureaucratic restrictions, or not caring enough.
As a society, we could recognize the status with money in the form of childcare grants and food assistance to parents, or by raising wages so both parents don't have to work, but neither of those is in the interest of the capital class, so we don't.
Bored heroes might still be bored. It is all about choice and it is OK to chose not to be a heroes. We do not need to glorify that individual choice I guess, but make sure that there are choices. (Me and my wife are happy that those choices existed for us and my daughter has happy and fulfilled parents even if they are no heroes)
My wife would prefer to focus on being a mom but feels too pressured from outside into having a job. Also, it's hard to afford a house these days with one income alone.
> the narrative pushed by most of the woke people is that it is slavery and demeaning to raise your children and that women would rather make powerpoints for some random white dude paid 40-70k$/year than be enslaved to raising children
I was about to respond with a snarky-yet-witty comment refuting this, but then probably both of us would be running afoul of HN guidelines.
>> the narrative pushed by most of the woke people is that it is slavery and demeaning to raise your children and that women would rather make powerpoints for some random white dude paid 40-70k$/year than be enslaved to raising children
Why is this comment running afoul of HN guidelines?
FWIW, I've heard this exact narrative expressed strongly by certain Feminists. (Note: not all feminists are the same; "woke" is a derogatory term that I do not assign to "feminists")
The difference is payment of time in care work, and not just for childcare but also for other forms of care (disabled, elderly).
Another very big issue is poverty. Time used for raising children doesn't count into pension payments, meaning that women who divorce from their husbands end up without anything in their name in the worst case.
This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally found among the poor, just among middle class and up women (and men), typically left-leaning.
Most poor mothers I've know would love to be stay-at-home moms because they're only working to survive and not for personal fulfillment, and because they love their kids.
Stay-at-home parenting being unpaid work is not an "attitude," it's a fact of life. The leverage that abusive wage-earners have over their "non-employed" coparent is pretty strongly tied to their respective affluence. This isn't a "left leaning" problem. It's a problem of poverty, lack of education, and a lack of society's willingness to pay parents to stay home and work there.
I'm pretty sure that infrastructure to pay parents to stay home counts as "socialism" which is vilified by the right.
Different family configurations appeared in many societies throughout history. The nuclear family is encouraged by capitalist states because one parent (the mother) staying home allows maximum flexibility for the male to be at work making money for the bosses. Importantly, the work the stay-at-home parent does is free, meaning the ruling class can pay them as little as possible. Nuclear families take up more real estate too, earning more money for banks and landlords.
The liberal feminist movement in the 1970s changed this equation somewhat. Now two parents work constantly, can barely afford their lifestyle and no one cares for the kids (or the latent gender role of the mother requires her to effectively work two jobs at full capacity)! The ruling class again wins at (again) the expense of the future as the family configuration has become biologically insufficient to reproduce. The additional workers contributed by women also makes the labor market more flexible for employers, another win.
Basically, we should ALL be doing less work and getting more services. Some poorer people are again looking at alternative family configurations because the nuclear model isn't sufficient to sustain life under these conditions.
My wife worked for several years. She stopped working when we had our 4th and child care was too expensive.
Now that she is a stay-at-home mom, our quality of life has improved a lot. She has more energy in the evening to read with our kids, she follows up with friends and we are both more social, she makes better food than either of us could do before.
Having a stay-at-home parent is DEFINITELY a luxury and a good decision IF you can afford it.
The thing is, for those parents who can afford one parent to stay home, in 99% of cases it's the mothers who end up as stay-at-home parents, and their careers (and with it, their post-childraising perspectives) go down the drain.
The current world abuses schools as whole day care institutions so that both parents can be exploited and worked to the ground, and when parents and children are home they are so tired they lack the energy to do anything meaningful besides eating some kind of processed food, play a round of video games, and go to bed.
In an ideal world, a full working week with a living wage would have 20 hours so that both parents can work four hours a day and then enjoy life with their children in the afternoon.
My guess is that more educated women are less willing to be stay at home moms and that correlates with your demographics. When you have a degree and dreams of a career, giving up on them is harder.
Also, the stigma against stay at home moms is nothing, nothing, compared to stay at home dads.
> My guess is that more educated women are less willing to be stay at home moms and that correlates with your demographics. When you have a degree and dreams of a career, giving up on them is harder.
Many middle class women and up also do housekeeping and care work. People are just different, and not everyone finds fulfillment in working outside the home. In fact with the pandemic making it so much easier to work while staying at home, some of these women might choose to find such work.
> This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally found among the poor
Any women's shelter will disagree with you here. The rate of women that go back to abusive partnerships is immensely high among those who don't have any other option to survive.
The title is literal, according to TFA the reason they started the company because they were bored with being housewives.
>”I cannot stand being at home,” said Lore in a 1983 New York Times article. ”It drives me insane. Everybody thought I was strange because I would not go to the bridge club or have my fingernails done.”
>Lore Harp met a kindred spirit in the form of a neighbor, Carole Ely, whose kids shared classes with the Harp children. Like Lore, she found the life of a homemaker wanting. “We were bored doing the housewife thing,” recalls Ely today. “I was ready to be something.” Just a few years prior, Ely had worked for large investment firms such as Merrill Lynch on the east coast, and she was itching to get back to business.
Because the objective of a 'headline' is to get people to continue reading, essentially it's clickbait. Which descriptive choice gets more notice and is more likely to provoke continued reading "two women" or "Two Bored...Housewives"?
I too get offended when salient information to the story is part of the headline.
I never want to read "Motorist kills 2 pedestrians", or "Policeofficer accused of planting evidence". It has to be "Person killed 2 other people" and "person accused of planting evidence" otherwise I am personally offended.
Anyone else remember when journalists were on some strange anti-SUV crusade. "SUV crashes into pedestrians", "SUV runs off bridge", "5 killed by SUV". The titles really read like SUVs had been co-opted by Skynet and were causing all sorts of mayhem.
The same reason that the maker of the machine itself, the husband, isn't mentioned in the title -- doesn't fit the narrative. Who'd ever want to hear about a couple and a friend starting a company? "Two Women" will get more attention, and therefore sell more ads, which is the reason that the publication exists.
“PC” is an IBM specific marketing term. The computers made by Vector Graphic were not PCs, they were microcomputers. The correct generic term is microcomputer, e.g. the Apple II was a microcomputer, never a PC. This naming convention persists today, it’s unusual to refer to a Mac as a PC.
It’s a small detail but it’s an important one and makes it seem like this article was poorly researched or the title is clickbait. Vector Graphic never entered the PC industry though they may have helped create the microcomputer industry.
A women had a husband (Bob) who was a genius at design and developing hardware accessories and later a full computer. He had little interest in running the business.
His work created a hardware company called Vector Computers.
His wife and another woman ran the business aspect of the company and the company did well.
It did well thanks to the husband's identification of a huge market that offered a lot of opportunity.
The company grew and this is certainly a credit for the two female executives. They were pioneers both as female executives and within getting in early in the computer industry.
Once Bob learned about this soon to be released IBM PC he requested and begged the company to start making IBM PC clones and accessories. He said the company had a year left unless it started embracing the PC
The now soon to be ex wife rejected this idea and kept the company running the same as always. She also fired her soon to be ex-husband.
She did take the company public within that year and was generous allotting stocks to every employee in the company. That was also a first.
I hope everyone sold their stock as soon as they could, given that the company died 2 years later. Because they are failed to adapt to a changing market and rejected advice of the technical founder and the guy who identified the market segment they started in.