This can be read as a story of what happens when management becomes divorced from engineering... literally.
>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
I think it reads more as a story of what happens when there are factors outside of your control while running your company. They could do nothing about the IBM PC and they even knew that IBM was mimicing their business strategy, and yet there was nothing they could do. IBM couldn't work with them because they couldn't handle the volume.
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 bought a PC-compatible from Corona circa 1983 after my extensive research showed it had better technology (and thus more of a chance of corporate survival) than the also-newly-created Compaq.
Everyone's dream? I dunno, getting life-changingly rich by selling worthless stock is kinda scary, much more so than winning a lottery (and I never bought a ticket because, among other things, winning is irksome.) It'd kinda ruin it for me.
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
"The firm ultimately shared its fate with the every other PC maker that didn't jump on the IBM clone bandwagon. The only consumer PC company that survived into the 1990s with its own significant platform was Apple, and even then, just barely."
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
Apple was #1 in personal computing before the IBM PC crushed the Apple II. Apple dropped below 10% market share during the PC era. It took a long time for the Macintosh to get any traction, partly because Apple was years late coming out with a good hard disk machine. (1983: IBM XT, 10MB internal hard drive standard. 1987: Macintosh SE, 20MB internal hard drive optional.) By the time Apple had caught up, the IBM PC was entrenched as the standard.
Apple was not #1 in personal computing. Commodore and Atari had higher market share numbers than Apple at the time of the PC launch. The PC destroyed the 8-bit market, and the Macintosh did not take it back when launched 3 years later.
Briefly, in 1981, Apple led on revenue.[1] (XLS file of sales data.) The Commodore 64 and the Atari 400 were much cheaper machines than the Apple II. Then they were all crushed by the IBM PC and clones.
The Commodore 64 wasn't released until August 1982 and the PC did take a while to beat it in marketshare. The VIC-20 was Commodore's monster seller before that (1st computer to hit 1 million unit sales). I did not see the VIC-20 listed on the chart, so I suspect it is in the other category. Given that is was released in 1980, I find it likely that it outsold Apple and the chart is hiding the actual Commodore number. Never mind the lack of Timex / Sinclair or TI computers in that spreadsheet. Calling Apple #1 when its market share never exceeded 16% is a bit off.
I think it boils down to: Apple established a platform and ecosystem for consumers, education, and business. The S100 companies largely sold CP/M boxes for business use. When PC clones turned "business" computers into a commodity, there was still a reason to buy Apples.
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.
Not much, really. I would even dispute the premise: the Commodore Amiga was still a viable platform up through the mid-'90s, for instance, and Atari's ST was still around and kicking then too.
Much or most of the Amiga and Atari ST installed base in the '90s was "low quality" though: users who didn't have hard disks and likely couldn't afford one, who were possibly using a TV and likely couldn't afford a decent monitor, who didn't have a printer and who were mostly buying games that came on booter floppies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_booter . Those guys would have had trouble using business/"productivity" software effectively even if they'd been interested in buying it. Obviously there were better-equipped Amiga and ST systems too, but by and large Apple and the PC had run away with the users who had the budget and the inclination to run application software.
(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.)
If a few -- and only a few -- things had gone differently, Commodore could be Apple. The Amiga was ahead of its time and was in many ways far better than the Macintosh (at the time, or even a bit later).
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.
Amiga was well represented until the late 90s when the print magazines died off and that was the death knell. Both Amiga and Atari were in Computer Shopper too, albeit token pages.
Apple had a strong foothold in education with the Apple II, and the Macintosh had better graphics capabilities than stock PCs into the 90s giving Apple a strong presence in the design industry.
Momentum and brand, and a band of loyal enthusiasts to carry the flag through the dark years.
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.
> What made Apple SO different from all the others that failed?
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.
Many of the non-Apple, non-IBM-clone personal computer companies bundled machines with their own OS. Doing that may distinguish Apple from Vector, but it doesn't explain why Apple alone succeeded of the non-IBM personal computer firms of the time (being the best established when the IBM onslaught came, OTOH, might.)
They were entrenched in a few niche markets: Education, Music Production, Desktop Publishing. Photoshop, Pagemaker, ProTools were all Mac first, so that's where the users were and they were locked in due to files, plugins, fonts etc.
None of that stuff existed yet. We're talking about the CP/M era companies that failed to transition to the IBM PC era, essentially pre-Mac, though some of them did last into the late eighties, IIRC.
Those things did come to exist in the '80s, and they were what helped the Mac to survive that decade. PageMaker and the Apple LaserWriter were announced on the same day in early 1985. And while by the late '90s it was mostly lock-in and loyalty that were keeping graphics and publishing professionals on the Mac, in the late '80s the Macintosh clearly was the best platform for GUI print and graphics applications (unless you considered workstation systems maybe, which most users weren't doing). Windows didn't take off until version 3.0 in 1990; Photoshop wasn't available for it until 1992. (Photoshop itself wasn't so dominant at that stage though.) The Mac was the flagship platform even for Microsoft's GUI office software: both Word and Excel were originally Mac software, Word for Windows didn't arrive until '89, and WinWord didn't become a hit until Windows 3.0 and WinWord 1.1 in 1990. In fact, it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that "core" Microsoft—the MS that dominated computing with Windows and Office, rather than the earlier company that produced good BASICs and got lucky with MS-DOS—was fundamentally a Macintosh ISV (a good Macintosh ISV, mind you) that got ideas above its station.
That's how I remember it. The Mac came out only four years after the IBM PC and allowed Apple to sew up the GUI market for about five years. They were able to maintain a big quality edge for far longer.
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.
A well kept secret was that Apple sold an AppleTalk card for the IBM PC, which was hands down the easiest way to network PCs. That's how I laser printed my dissertation. ;-)
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.
Well, there was Novell NetWare some time before Windows for Workgroups arrived. Of course the crushing of NetWare was a major campaign in Microsoft's war for dominance over personal computing.
Technically, Atari and Commodore survived to the 90's but both were gone by the mid 90's. Along with Jay Miner, sadly.
[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?
Assuming you mean the Mac IP and if so I believe Microsoft had a cross licensing deal in place which would cover it. It never got to litigation though.
To be fair Commodore and Atari were still making their own computers (Amiga/ST) in the early nineties. More accurate would be "consumer PC company that survived into the 1995s"
Or better: "How 2 wives created Silicon Valley". Rewind the clock to that morning in 1938 when Bill Hewlett started working with David Packard in the garage at the house where Packard lived. They worked there for 1 year. They made no money for 1 year. Meanwhile, Mrs Packard went out to work, and later Mrs Hewlett went out to work. And for several decades afterwards, this was how many early stage startups in the Valley were financed: finance-via-wife.
Pretty awesome story. All articles I've seen on women in tech talk of Fiorina, Mayer, etc. Yet, these women were awesome, their influence great, and I've never heard of them. Should probably get cited more often in discussions on either women in tech or historical accounts of entrepreneurs making it big on a budget.
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. ;)
(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.)
My Dad had a Vector in the 80s - learned a lot from it. It had a big reset button on the front, which instantly booted into the "monitor" - a program which let you inspect and disassemble RAM. (RAM was not erased in the reboot.)
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.
You won't need to imagine that, you can look around you and see it every day, we're heading there pretty rapidly only via a slightly different path than the one that you are suggesting.
>Bob designed other boards for S-100 bus machines, including a PROM board that eliminated the need for hobbyists to manually enter a boot-up program sequence via front panel switches
Does it mean Bob Harp invented the BIOS?
Wikipedia has the term BIOS being used in the way we expect by CP/M in 1975, the article has Vector starting in 1976 and the PROM board created after their memory board saw success.
It sounds like he brought the BIOS to S-100 bus machines though.
CP/M hardly ran on anything but S-100 bus machines in the beginning.
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.
Me too. I have a real fascination for this Cambrian period of computing, even though I came into it via the strange world of home computers (Sinclair). By the time I got my hands on business computers, Wintel had won.
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.
There are tons of fascinating companies like this. Personally I like Connectix. Almost nobody (other than early hardcore Apple users) knows about Connectix, but start listing their products and :o
tangential: the cover (http://b.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline/...) with the Altair - the spark of one tech revolution - also contains the "CCD's - TV Camera Tube Successor?". It is like the editors were able to somehow feel heartbeat pulse of the future ...
>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