Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home
every.to
every.to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
(Note Steve Jobs used the Osborne effect to promote the Mac at the expense of Apple's own Lisa.)
The Vector 4 and 4-S did receive MS-DOS 2.0 support at some point. I have a working Vector 4 with MS-DOS, and this floppy[1] looks to be for the 4-S. Although larger changes would have been needed to become more "IBM compatible" (of which 4-S was a step).
> They rejected her plan to develop a new machine that would focus on networking and telecommunications, which she saw as the future of computing.
Vector was one of the first shipping a product using twisted-pair networking[2]. It seems that didn't make much of a splash; very little information is available. It was a S-100 board, which maybe limited market appeal by that time.
1. https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=29115 2. https://groups.google.com/g/s100computers/c/Q8BUj8xHp5E/ (my post)
Yeah, I think like everything their issue (with hindsight) was mostly that they needed to be faster on the changes across the board to survive.
I don't really blame them for missing that window. It was so small to begin with thanks to IBM.
I'll be covering IBM and Don Estridge next.
In that era Apple had an enormous lead in graphics, software, and peripheral cards.
To be fair, CP/M machines had much better software tooling available than the hobbyist 6502 computers for a long time - compare MBASIC or CBASIC to what shipped with your favorite home computer. And S-100 systems like the Vector had a tremendous ecosystem of cards but my recollection from reading BYTE as a kid was it was not a plug-and-play matter to get them working in your system.
They offered loans and let dealers delay payments on deliveries to get them through the tough times.
It arguably cost them ground against IBM because it squeezed them further financially. But it was also another reason the Dealer network remained fiercely loyal to Vector - especially under Harp.
Where have you been?
That ignoring history
The irony being that by saying this you're literally dismissing the voices and lived experiences of many many women in tech who would say otherwise.
I'd love to hear thoughts on this take about just how inclusive the tech industry from women, or LGBTA or BiPoC individuals.
(PSA: "you guys" is gender neutral)
(Love your ongoing blog and output)
I’d love to read more about these products and their history. It was all very opaque. Even back then.
> With her friend Carole Ely, she grew their company, Vector Graphic, into a major manufacturer of microcomputers
wikipedia says
> Vector Graphic sales peaked in 1982, by which time the company was publicly traded, at $36 million. It faltered soon after...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic
taking a microcomputer company from nothing to a near-billion-dollar market cap on the public markets is nothing to sneeze at. on the other hand, tens of thousands of microcomputers per year doesn't qualify as 'a major manufacturer of microcomputers'. commodore sold three hundred thousand c64s in 01982. apple broke a billion dollars in sales that year. lore harp's company had almost 4% of that. you could reasonably describe mits, imsai, commodore, apple, atari, and tandy/radio shack as 'major manufacturers of microcomputers' in that time period, but not vector. they were small fry, like heath/zenith or cromemco
this unforgivable level of puffery suggests that much of the article may be false (as valley_guy_12 points out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39972703, this puffery is something it has in common with the company's name, even if it doesn't quite rise to the level of 'intergalactic digital research')
Apple's total sales in 1978 [1] were only 30% higher than Vector's in 1979 [2]. Yeah, the industry growth at the time means comparing even consecutive years gets dicey, but I don't think the gap between the two was enormous at that point. Comparable to Apple in the late 70s sounds pretty major to me.
Also, it is reasonable to say "major" is an absolute description that just means "pretty big" not "one of the biggest". As you mention, their sales peak (IMO, past the company's relevance peak) is pretty big in absolute terms.
Extrapolating this disagreement into "much of the article may be false" is ... confusing.
[1] https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/april/...
[2] http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/Vector%20Grap...
>Remember Lore Harp? The housewife-turned-MBA who was splashed on the cover of Inc. magazine, lionized in Savvy and interviewed at reverent length by the Harvard Business Review?
>If you have forgotten, it’s not surprising. Vector Graphic, the company Lore and Bob Harp founded nine years ago on their kitchen table in Westlake Village, was ambushed a few years back by management blunders and a good-sized competitor by the name of IBM.
It was one reason I wanted to tackle Osborne first in the series - because Vector did, quite legitimately, Osborne Effect themselves with the 4. Which absolutely didn't help.
The arrival of the IBM PC (and PC-DOS/MS-DOS) in 1981 was an extinction-level event for the CP/M-based, mostly-Z80-based, 8-bit business microcomputer industry. Vector did not weather it.
Downside of how much tech has changed is stuff gets missed in a copy edit because the numbers sound so silly (to modern ears) they assume I haven't screwed up a typo or find/replace.
I'll flag it.
http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Manuals/Vector%20Gra...
Sadly both the display technology and the graphics memory are raster. I was hoping it would be something like the Vectrex or the Imlac.
Thanks, that PDF is a trip down memory lane. Display memory was indeed coming from 0hE000-0hFFFF. I taught myself Z80 from the Vector 3 manual. The whole BIOS source code with comments!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley
[0] She hired all the female IBM coders who couldn't make a career at IBM
Turnaround time could be days, which encouraged being very scrupulous when coding.
Since I'm old, I remember writing FORTRAN -- it was all caps back then -- programs in my dorm room and then going down to the computer "room" and accessing the Dartmouth Time Sharing System to type it in and run it.
Since there was only a single machine, mostly we had to submit our code on cards. Not quite punch cards with chads but an optical equivalent when you marked the hole with a sharpie.
For example, Tymshare, where I worked for several years, was founded in 1964. Their customers used Teletype machines at their own locations, dialing into a Tymshare mainframe and paying by the hour.
There were a number of similar timesharing companies in that era. Call Computer and Dial Data come to mind, along with Transdata where I worked in Phoenix before moving to the Bay Area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter
I had an office at Tymshare's Cupertino headquarters, and a Teletype at home to work remotely.
This proved handy one year when the company was doing some final acceptance tests on the Xerox Data Systems (XDS) Sigma 7. The problem was that all of us preferred the competing DEC PDP-10. So the company really wanted those tests to fail.
My manager called me into his office one day and said, "This conversation is strictly between you and me. You are our best Sigma 7 expert [I'd worked on the similar Sigma 5 at Transdata] and even you like the PDP-10 more. But at this point the only way we can get out of the Xerox deal is if the acceptance tests fail."
I took the hint, and the acceptance tests mysteriously started going haywire!
Eventually I failed to cover my tracks well enough, and Xerox spotted my username in a core dump.
Back to my manager's office. "Xerox figured out what you were doing, and we had to tell them we would fire you. So, you're fired. But you still have your Teletype at home? And you have plenty of other work to do on the PDP-10, right? Can you work from home unofficially and keep track of your hours? Just stay away from the Sigma 7. After this all blows over, we will re-hire you and pay you that back pay."
So I did, and they did!
Today, have to get that in writing otherwise risk getting hung out to dry in court or worse.
This sort of thing still goes on all the time. If your not part of it your either in "Giant Corp" or the wrong company, or you have the wrong boss, or you are the wrong person.
Many managers see a slightly more difficult hiring environment (for themselves) and completely fold to secure their own position.
EDIT: I've met many great managers, or at least individuals who seem great from the outside when the chips aren't on the table. But from the trenches I feel a real lack of leadership in Tech management in the current era.
It is much harder to get to that level of trust when you cant break bread, when you cant read all the body language. In person does make some things easier... One week a month of hot desking can do a lot for teams.
I don't mean this as criticism of anyone, but I feel like this whole multiyear discussion has been confounding for anyone working on any kind of multi-office team because it's such a non-issue in our experience. It has similarly been fascinating to watch the teams in my company that are NOT multioffice struggle with a distributed workforce. People aren't usually good at what they don't know, but, in my experience, a distributed workforce is absolutely something a company can accommodate with the right leaders and leadership.
There's a youtube interview with Shirley showing someone remote working with some sort of computer like device. A terminal maybe? https://youtu.be/d5nzJ1rQBew?t=228
* IISc - Indian Institute of Science
* Madras, now Chennai was probably an overnight drive in the late 60s.
Might be hidden in some biography though.
Speculation: maybe they mailed in their punch cards to main office.
Or called it in over the phone.
https://www.manager-magazin.de/hbm/eine-firma-ohne-bueros-a-...
A woman named "Steve" – IT pioneer, entrepreneur, philanthropist (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39585527 - March 2024 (123 comments)
All-female distributed-team software startup goes big in 1962 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6861666 - Dec 2013 (0 comments, but worth reading the article)
A Woman's Place - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5692271 - May 2013 (1 comment)
If Every commission 'season two' of this series, then I'll likely focus on figures from the software side of Silicon Valley. Steve makes that list in a heartbeat.
https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/blackberry/
I assume all "documentary" or "based on real events" type media is completely fiction, unless specific events in the media are otherwise noted to be true.
Another thing is culture. The in the company's where I've worked at, how the men talked about women was pretty off-putting to be honest. They didn't do it in front of women (obviously), but even your nerdy developers would drop comments that had me wondering whether I was really in the ckrrect field. I'm sure the women in those places notice that even if it's behind their backs.
That's for a myriad of reasons, but the main one being that men gravitate to tech more, so even if they're not a huge talent they still might choose a career in tech, whereas women might prefer a different career unless they have a very strong calling.
Every human being, man or woman, has unique challenges. Classifying these challenges by sex ignores the vast and more important majority of an individual's fitness for one career or another, or lack there of.
More than just encouraging your daughter to study tech or any other career (tech might be saturated), encourage them to learn how to interview aggressively, and how to ask for raises. Encourage them to be fearless.
And do the same for your sons.
Have you faced sex based discrimination, intimidation or othering in your workplace?
> ignores the vast and more important majority of an individual's fitness
The issue is that the capacity of women is backgrounded to the point that they have to do more to be seen as talented as their male counterparts. I'm sure every woman in tech would love to focus on skills instead of sex but that's just not the world they're presented with.
> More than just encouraging your daughter to study tech
More than this teach your sons about bias against women, how to have empathy for historically marginalised groups, how to give space for quieter voices, the broader cultural norms that lead to inequality etc
You can teach generations of daughters whatever you like but the weight of solving these issues is far from resting only on women, and the idea that it is is ironically hostile in itself.
I've spoken with many women about this and volunteered alongside many others on various projects aiming to help tackle these issues such as Women in Tech Netherlands. The women I've encountered have universally recognised the importance of allyship. Who are the women you spoke with who laughed?
You can read about that's importance of allyship here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/women-tech-why-allyship-impor...
You might disagree with what she says but you'll struggle you convince me that I should give more weight to your views on this than the actual women involved.
My mother retired in the 2000's earning more than 2M / yr running her own business. That's net, not gross. A single mother of two. My earliest memories are in a homeless shelter. It's not a competition to know someone. While not a woman, I earn in the top 1%. I credit my mom for that.
It's obvious that people who focus on what's in their control, tend to produce results.
Ally groups are great for networking. It's just not what I'm talking about.
And many people get heaped additional challenges by virtue of their birth group - challenges that are commonly supplied by people whose birth group started at the lowest difficulty level.
Everyone has countless reasons to fail. Sex is by far among the smallest of those reasons.
By smallest you mean over 50% of the population.
Giving everyone a dollar is the same as giving no one a dollar. -Econ 101
Compare that with say, severe anxiety, inability to take tests, low IQ. Or even just lack of interview experience, and never asking for a raise.
These last two dramatically affect income and are true of a strikingly large number of women compared with men.[1]
Is it possible that women aren't asking for raises because everyone keeps telling them that they need "special" help (implied inferiority)? That they won't get raises, so why bother?
I think it's a factor. I think your argument, while well intentioned, might be causal in preventing women's success.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/women-are-still-not-a...
We won't care about men being under represented, but colleges may worry that they are losing out on customers if the male population of college buyers swings that low. That may prompt marketing campaigns to try and attract men into college.
I mean, it is not like we care about women being under represented either. Nobody is ever bothered by just 5% of firefighters being female. Tech was only ever concerned about women in tech because the industry was desperate for a larger pool of workers and women looked like an untapped source of people.
This is called whataboutery. The fact that we are still de-railing conversations about women's representation to centre men's issues shows exactly why there's still so much work to be done.
You could argue about whether or not it's a good proxy for success, but your response sounds like you think women would be more likely to drop out of the field alltogether than men, which doesnt appear to be true
And I'd argue it's a pretty bad proxy. Because the field might be growing (or shrinking) and percentages don't mean anything. 23% of 10k is less than 20% of 5k, for example. The percentage numbers don't really indicate whether someone will stay in the field, it's just a number that's highly dependent on a lot of variables and a very bad indicator for "people are staying in the field". I'm happy to be corrected, it's just how I read this.
Additionally, if your assumption is that 23%>20%, that would kind of mean that it's capped at 23%, right? Once more the CS degree quota is higher than 23%, following your logic, that would be an indicator that women are more likely to leave the field because it naturally gravitates towards 23%. But that's not based on anything, you could argue just as well that it's an indicator that more women are starting to take interest in CS as a career.
Top earning fields (+most fields) were rife with strong resistance to hiring women. For women who'd managed jobs in top-earning professions (<pay) - this was constant, persuasive pressure to stay where they were.
source: grew up around professional women born early 1920s (budget analyst, peace corps, navy intel, usvp sec).
And what do those statistics show, only that women are vastly under-represented in work and education. There's very heavy cultural reasons for that and your comment actually feels reflective of them.
>This is called whataboutery.
He brought up the plight of another group, and you're saying, "What about women?"
I'm sure your goals are pure, and you really want to help women, but you're studying schools of thought that serve to dismantle your efforts.
A solution that treats one group as lesser than another will never be free from hypocrisy, just as it is not free from it here.
Fair for only me isn't fair. No one thinks so. Think about it.
Behind every successful woman is a man, who tried to stop her: Not quite, but her husband could not cope with a wife better than him. Perhaps she was "out of his league"?
What are you talking about? Her husband Bob Harp was the head of R&D and main technical and product force behind all of Vector products [0]. After he left in 1982 over the dispute with Lore about who should run the company Vector quickly deflated. Vector was a great partnership between Lore and Bob until it wasn't.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-20-fi-2173-s...