How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry (2015)
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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...
Sounds like a large number of executives to me, honestly.
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?
Startup employees should never feel bad about selling their stock. The opportunity is rare enough.
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."
It is an article that shows how two bored 1970's housewives helped to create the pc industry. It's a bit of a clickbait title but it's accurate.
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.
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.
Still can, really.
Management talent, not so much.
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.
Telenor, Nordea, DNB or Insurance companies...
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.
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.
One of their ads is titled "The Apple vs. IBM debate is over. Meet the Winner." [1]
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.
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.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/04/08/chapter...
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.)
But anyway, it's a matter of perspective, I suppose, and which social bubble one inevitably inhabits.
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.
Sounds like the approach Edward Bernays would take
(Corona Data Systems was co-founded by Robert Harp)
Looking at their designs in the article, they just ooze cool.
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.)
[1] https://https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/10/business/corporat...
How is that even possible? Two flights every day?
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...
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.
Then a few weeks later came all the TSA crap...
The other poster mentions that you could smoke on the plane (in the back rows) and that was true, disgustingly enough.
And let's not even talk about the departure lounges in the airports.
"Biden's apparently traveled over 2 million miles, the equivalent of four years of his life, on Amtrak."
https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a32363173/joe-biden-amt...
Amtrak is quite slow. Jetliners are ~4-8x faster.
How Two Bored 1970s Housewives Helped Create the PC Industry (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249920 - Jan 2018 (29 comments)
How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9929333 - July 2015 (69 comments)
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.
Back then they did not know that moms are heroes and being a mom is a full-time job.
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.
Their students know. Even if it's a noisy metric, over the course of a few years a teacher will have 100+ students.
As well as the important truth that not woman is suited to, likes, or wants to do 100% of the time.
My experience is that being a full time mum is valued less now.
Interesting choice of headline.
>”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.
bored 1970s housewives = bored adult females in the 1970s who have forgone a professional occupation to be a homemaker
They used the latter because it's far more descriptive, and these facts are relevant to the article.
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.
Bigger yuck.
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.