How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
>Lore Harp and Carole Ely of Westlake Village brought along the Vector 1, a PC designed by Lore's husband, Bob Harp.
>In 1980, the partnership began to crack at the seams. The stresses of the company took a heavy toll on Bob and Lore's marriage, prompting them to seek a divorce.
>Bob fought with Vector's board of directors, insisting the company should sell an IBM PC compatible machine, but Lore and the board resisted. [...] "I felt that I had to leave the company and start another one based on PC compatibles," says Bob. Vector's board granted his wish, firing him in 1981. The following year, Bob founded Corona Data Systems, which created one of the first IBM PC clones.
>Lore became the first female founder to take her company public on the New York Stock Exchange. But the celebration was short-lived. IBM PC's jump into the personal computer market in August of that year had a clarifying effect on the industry.
>In 1982, Lore married tech media magnate Patrick McGovern, the founder of research firm IDC and publisher of Computerworld and InfoWorld [...] She sought a new beginning with more time devoted to her marriage. [...] Between the grueling daily commute and a lack of love from the board of directors, Lore had had enough. She stepped down once again, this time for good. It was 1984; she was 40 years old.
>The company filed for bankruptcy in 1985, ceased operations in 1986, and a holding company liquidated all its assets [...] in 1987
They knew their end was coming and they all exited the company when they saw what was coming. I think they showed themselves to be much more savvy then you give them credit for.
Today, it would be like you finding out that Google is about to come to compete with you.
They did great, I think. They did an IPO, cashed out, stuck the investors with the shitty stock, gave all of their employees significant stock grants, and went on to live nice lives. That's everyone's HN dream.
Except for doing what the engineering guy had proposed - selling an IBM PC compatible machine. PC clones became a huge industry in the mid '80s. The first Compaq was sold in 1982, the first Dell in 1985. It looks like Vector missed out on this very lucrative market because of the rift between its engineering and management.
I mean, I'm in it for the money and all, but one needs a lot of contempt for the guy stuck with worthless stock to feel perfectly fine with the outcome. Unless you genuinely thought it was a good deal for the buyer and even then its disappointing a bit
Actually, they could have done what one of the founders suggested, and actually did after leaving the company: create an IBM compatible system.
What would you call that, Flash Of Actual Content?
What made Apple SO different from all the others that failed?
Might sound odd or just plain weird, but Apple targeted the mainstream and education for name recognition. In fact, a lot of people still believe Apple invented the PC when their claim to fame was building something for the non-hobbyist / professional. This mindshare carried them through some horrific management in the 80's and 90's.
I do agree with minthd that having their own OS was a factor, but Commodore could have claimed that also along with having a much more advanced machine than Apple.
[edit]here is the ad https://www.pinterest.com/pin/406942516299771530/ [NSFW pictures greyed out around it] I do believe there was a really hokey Ben Franklin version also - to give some context that where Atari was advertising
[edit] I often wonder if there had been a in the same price range, better 16-bit or 32-bit successor to the 6502 would things have turned out differently?
Apple also introduced the first LAN (Apple Talk in 1985) you could set up pretty much by just connecting your Macs with a cable. I recall working at places where the only way you could transfer data between the PCs was by floppy, but people who had managed to convince management they needed a Mac were all wired together. Microsoft didn't introduce Windows for Workgroups for another seven years.
If Apple had tried to evolve the II series they probably wouldn't have survived.
The Apple II could not evolve. It was locked down by the expectation that new systems would run old software, and the old software made all kinds of nonstandard system calls, e.g., jumping into the middle of system routines to save one or two cycles. In other words, Apple didn't know their own software interface. Even upgrading to the IIe was a heroic undertaking. This experience is why, I believe, the Mac was always a closed system.
Who would be crazy enough to network 50 endpoints over slow serial daisy chain? Arcnet was another story, but not significantly cheaper.
[1] http://jeremyreimer.com/uploads/Computer_Smartphone_tablet_m...
Apple commodified fun computing - made it affordable, a bit lateral, a bit serious, but also creative and artistic.
No other computer company tried to own that space. The 8-bit S-100 companies were all serious bizness. Then IBM ate business computing, and it was all over for them.
Atari and Amiga tried to get into that space, and did okay for quite a long time. They died when they couldn't keep up with Apple or PC hardware.
Much later Apple did the same thing again with the iPhone and the iPad. (But not Watch, which is none of the above.)
IMO this is why MS completely failed with Win 8/10. They tried to make an OS that looks like it should be playing in that space, but MS isn't culturally predisposed to being lateral, fun, or artistic.
So instead of a camper van with a rocket engine they made a Jeep and glued Lego all over the windows. (Lego is fun, right?)
This never happened. Even today, where Apple enjoys revenue and popularity, the computers Apple sells still take less than 5% of market share and they are business computers, certainly not considered "fun" ones.
> made it affordable
Until just a few years ago, Apple was -- rightfully -- considered to be selling computers much more expensive than the competition. This image changed a bit these last few years but even today, a Mac Book Pro costs comparatively 30% more than the competition.
Apple was never about being affordable. Ever.
> They died when they couldn't keep up with Apple or PC hardware.
Atari and Amiga died for one reason and one reason alone: Windows.
When they died, Apple was close to being bankrupt as well and it only survived thanks to Bill Gates saving the company by injecting cash in it (mostly forced so it could sustain anti competitivity accusations).
> IMO this is why MS completely failed with Win 8/10.
Uh? Are you talking about Windows 8 and the upcoming Windows 10? Windows 8 was a pretty big success, even though it never got as popular as Windows 7 or XP.
Others have given decent answers, but, honestly, I don't think Apple was all that different. As you noted, "... even then, just barely."
We tend to think of Apple rather differently, today. But remember that Apple wasn't really such a big deal 20 years ago. The Apple that just barely made it through the 1980s and the Apple that reworked NeXTSTEP into OS X, brought out the iPhone, etc., are rather different beasts. They share a name and some corporate infrastructure, but not a lot else, really.
Apple succeeded because it found two niches to sustain it -- education, design. Both Commodore and Apple had small but enthusiastic base of fans, but it's been shown time and again that fans alone are not enough to sustain a whole platform or company.
(In general, the serious cost barrier of a hard disk and a decent monitor as more or less the price of entry to serious computing almost certainly had a major impact on the shape of the computing industry until pretty recently.)
There was also an insistence on quality for a long time, and to be something else other than a business computer.
It's really a miracle they survived. It was very close. I can remember a time when we would laugh at people for persisting with an Apple. In those days there was hardly any software available, and career-wise, it looked like the deadest of dead ends.
The first time I remember this changing was circa 2003 when a friend confided he'd bought an Apple and was attempting to re-learn how to use it. It sounded odd at the time (he previously had been a linux installer) and I distinctly remember it because it was the earliest indicator of a change in the wind.
An example on the technical side would be Margaret Hamilton: the woman who pretty much invented [1] software engineering (and coined the term) during Apollo project. The first CASE tool for it, too, IIRC. The reliability and integration capabilities of their production code exceeded [2] anything I see in Agile, etc. Yet, I didn't see her name in any mainstream article on the subject and only knew about her due to a casual mention by a friend while discussing high assurance systems. Seemed to be better known in research sector per Wikipedia [3].
So, next time Mr. Nadella at Microsoft wants to rag on women in tech, we can remind him of two whose management talent he still hasn't beat and one that his engineers lag behind in production code despite not being limited to 60's era tech. ;)
[1] http://htius.com/Articles/r12ham.pdf
(See more of how they started rather than USL itself. Talk about straight up hitting all the problems head-on, at once, and attempting once-and-for-all.)
[2] http://www.htius.com/News_Links/251093main_The_NASA_Heritage...
(see page 13 for specific principles she derived)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist...
They say things like "Atari 420ST" on that show.
You could, of course use the monitor to disassemble the monitor, which was a good way to learn assembly language.
Later I wired an Atari joystick to the machine - it had some kind of GPIO pins. It was a very hackable platform, with S100 slots, tons of space inside, and lots of DSUB cutouts on the rear panel.
Wrote several video games in Z80 for that machine, although graphics were limited to TRS-80 style 6-pixels-per-character.
Later I found out that Disney Imagineering built a loudspeaker monitoring multiplexer around a similar S100 computer. It allowed a sound technician to remotely choose an amp output to monitor. I wonder how many other cool applications these machines enabled.
1. The show's story and characterization is innovative because it intentionally is about people who lived in a historical period, not people who shaped it. Joe and Gordon are not Jobs and Wozniak. Jobs and Woz are Jobs and Woz, and in the long run the Macintosh eats the Giant's lunch. So it's cool to see ambitious people try to reach for the stars, even if they're fated to fail.
2. The show does a good job not being solely about the drama or about the technology and history thereof, but of being an acceptable blend of the two. Certainly the tech details are sometimes inaccurate, and the history skewed (the characters keep coming up with ideas for which there already were contemporaries). And the drama is often contrived, and in the first season, often not very good. But somehow when then come together the weaknesses manage to get overshadowed by the strengths. A good hack of a prestige drama.
Or if they started an app store.
It sounds like he brought the BIOS to S-100 bus machines though.
It was common in those days to compile the BIOS directly into your copy of CP/M, rather than running it from ROM. CP/M had memory areas set aside that you could patch. The ROM was only expected to contain a boot loader that would copy the OS image into memory and jump to it.
I saved an S-100 machine from the skip when I was at school, made by SWTPC. It ran Uniflex, a version of the Flex operating system which was designed for multiple users, based on some Unix ideas.
It worked briefly when I got it but then stopped, and I could never figure out why. In the end, I donated it to this guy http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/fixed_pages/swtp.html who I found via the wonderful alt.folklore.computers newsgroup.