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Comment by redm | Hacker News Reader

This was a fun read and a great 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."

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Right. But the article isn't titled: How Two Bored 1970s Housewives Created the PC Industry

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.

What is the "housewives" wording trying to achieve?

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.

They understand the value to the reader, just not the value to the marketer. It's a pity the two interests aren't better aligned in this case.

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.

Well if the writing intentionally leaves out salient facts to shape a very specific and potentially misleading narrative, we call that propaganda.

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.

Many people helped create the industry. This article focused on two of them.

Bob looks to be a more important part of the story than Carole. He is certainly mentioned more often and his contributions are more clearly defined.

In those days, you could throw a rock in a random direction and hit a talented engineer.

Still can, really.

Management talent, not so much.

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.

And why do you think that is the case? Clickbait, pure and simple.

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