How Two Bored 1970s Housewives Helped Create the PC Industry (2015) | Hacker News Reader

How Two Bored 1970s Housewives Helped Create the PC Industry (2015)

fastcompany.com

83 pointssigna1129 comments

I love the part where the engineer suggests naming the company "Vector Graphics" because that was what he wanted to build, but never got around to making it.

Kind of a shame the board decided to fight IBM head on instead of adapting to build clones. It seems like they were just enjoying their fat margins a bit too much to want to change, and then it was too late.

My recollection is that there was a Vector Graphics in Woodland Hills in the San Fernando Valley around 1972 that was doing something with high-resolution black-and-white video graphics powered by a PDP-8 or something similar. Was that a previous enterprise by any of the same people? Maybe my recollection is in error???

Perhaps you are thinking of Vector General, Inc. which is located in Woodland Hills? [1]

[1] https://companiesmd.com/company/F01641729/vector-general-inc...

Great story, but the ads on this site are super aggressive. Enough so that I didn't finish the story. Pop ups, interstitials, and even redirects to other sites. Fastcompany... seriously? You're blacklisted now.

I always forget the "typical" web experience until I use one of my kid's android tablets, but uBlock Origin is truly your friend for sites like this. It makes the web sane again!

For their safety and sanity you may want to set up a network-wide ad blocker like Pi-hole [1].

[1]: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole

I have good luck with Block This!: https://block-this.com/

(I built it from scratch, so I can't speak to the safety of their APK, but they seem trustworthy.)

Firefox on Android supports plugins.

:-D

What ads? I didn't see any and if you did, uBlock origin will improve your web browsing significantly.

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9929333

Thanks for digging that up - I made a couple of comments on that thread. I remember Vector Graphics fondly, but I don't remember knowing about their female-dominated management structure. I only knew they made good products.

Sounds a lot like the first season of 'Halt and Catch Fire'.

Endlessly playing video which follows the main body of text you're trying to read, just to the right of the article. Distracting and with no relation to the content. If you hover over it to show an interface you can hit pause, but then the video restarts as soon as you scroll. It appears to only show once - after a reload the video is not shown - which makes me think it only affects first time visitors. But what a terrible impression to make alongside what is a thoughtfully researched piece.

Load the page, print to PDF, and read it locally. I know it's not ideal, but that's IMHO the best way to avoid the issue.

Fix video, audio, and battery with this 1 weird trick!

Firefox Focus might be the browser for you.

Can I install it on Linux?

Yeah - but it's only available for one distro: Android.

f-droid and anbox.io to the rescue?

Brave has done well on Mobile.

Came here to say the same! Very distracting to read.

Going mobile could be another option - Just read it on my phone and didn't notice any annoying videos / ads. You can also go on reader mode if you're on Safari.

For what it's worth I had the exact opposite experience. I closed the page without reading the article following a full screen video advert.

Yeah, it's very annoying.

To deal with stuff like this, I right click near the video area, go to Inspect, then just delete the portion of HTML that contains the unwanted element.

Really helps with pesky foreground pop up stuff.

I don't see that. You must not exercise very good control of your browser ;)

In Firefox, I could use its Reader View to remove most of the distracting elements. Would that work for you?

Two unrelated comments:

a) Fast Company's website has design has gotten worse over the years

b) Reader View is the bomb and I use it all the time now. Thanks Mozilla!

Safari displayed the video, but blocked it from automatically playing.

And I agree, it's a terrible impression. I don't know who keeps thinking user hostile stuff like this is acceptable.

You probably need to take a step back and ask what metrics are being optimised and why.

Someone has decided to optimise directly on present ad dollars, rather than user satisfaction which might correlate to future ad dollars. This might be a rational decision. Or it might be a short-termist error, or a case of optimising what is easiest to measure rather than what matters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com