
An 85-year-old tech entrepreneur who made her staff millionaires - tim333
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/business/the-85-year-old-tech-entrepreneur-who-made-her-staff-millionaires/ar-AACSD1h?li=BBoPWjQ
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tim333
In the news today The 85-year-old tech entrepreneur who made her staff
millionaires [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/85-year-old-tech-
entr...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/85-year-old-tech-entrepreneur-
made-staff-millionaires/) but paywalled

~~~
neonate
Internet archive has it:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190614110432/https://www.teleg...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190614110432/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/85-year-
old-tech-entrepreneur-made-staff-millionaires/)

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juliendorra
If you want to learn more about women programmers in the 60s in the UK and why
Stephanie Shirley had to open her own company (spoil: because women were
actively push out of the field), Marie Hicks is the specialist.[0] She wrote a
book, Programmed Inequality. She studied Shirley’s story of course, and did an
interview of Shirley last year.[1]

The article “only the clothes changed: Women Operators in British Computing
and Advertising, 1950–1970” from Hicks is a great start into her analysis of
the period. It’s a very different history of computing and programmers that
the one that was told just a few years ago.[2]

[0] [http://marhicks.com/](http://marhicks.com/) [1]
[http://mariehicks.net/blog/?p=705](http://mariehicks.net/blog/?p=705) [2]
[http://mariehicks.net/writing/clothes.html](http://mariehicks.net/writing/clothes.html)

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zhte415
Thank you for sharing. This was a wonderful story of warmth bestowed to her by
a generous but not wealthy family as a young child, and of her own grit and
determination against resistance and challenge, and of giving back to others.
I'm also quite astounded that married women in the UK could not open their own
bank accounts without their husband's permission - in the 1960s.

~~~
Consultant32452
This concept is called coverture. By law, upon marriage, a woman's identity
merged with the husband's into a single legal entity. But in practice, all of
the rights and responsibility fell to the man. Indeed the husband was also
legally responsible for the misdeeds of the wife. This is because the wife was
assumed to be acting under the orders of the husband, even if that were not
the case.

It was really messed up.

~~~
pmyteh
It was, though it didn't last until the 1960s - the Married Women's Property
Acts in the late 19th Century ended it.

The problem with mortgages was more quotidian sexism, I think: women weren't
considered to be serious enough earners to be creditworthy for a mortgage.

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dspig
Thanks to F-International my mum had a IBM PC at home with a massive 20 MB
hard drive. But "made her staff millionaires" is news to me :)

~~~
godelmachine
That lady is your mum?

~~~
allannienhuis
Worked for her company I expect, and sounds like she wan't one of the ones to
receive the stock grant mentioned :)

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javery
I recently read her auto-biography and it was excellent.

[https://www.amazon.com/Let-Go-Extraordinary-Entrepreneur-
Phi...](https://www.amazon.com/Let-Go-Extraordinary-Entrepreneur-
Philanthropist/dp/0241395496/)

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HillaryBriss
Workers didn't have to drive themselves crazy being on call all night or
working weekends. She actually operated a successful tech company with
incredibly flexible hours!

 _For us you could work part-time, freelance, take a job share. You could do
annualised hours, min-max hours, have a zero-hours contract (I know those
contracts are very unpopular now but they did work well for us in those early
days)._

~~~
zeristor
Although she herself worked 80 hours as the article states

~~~
lostctown
Which couldn't be more ok. Hacker news comes down hard on people who casually
throw out their unrealistic work hours, but for some of us it's the only way
we'd stay competitive. I'm 26 with 5 years development experience and frankly,
not the smartest man in the world. Things don't come easy to me. I take longer
than my peers to learn concepts in software and business. But where I win is
in my ability to work harder than my peers and compound the knowledge I do
have. Sometimes even, I am perceived as "smart" by those who haven't worked 1
on 1 with me. Watching someone learn something in a week that took you almost
a month; or building a reasonably successful company without doing the 80 hour
week thing kills me a little inside. But that's life. You're given some amount
intellect and if you want success you will have to pay your own costs to reach
success, which may or may not be as much as what your peers have to pay.

The only golden rule I follow, never expect another human to work as hard as
me for something that mostly benefits me. I do not believe in shaming
employees that only put in their 40 and get out. That's great, they care about
different things in life. Some of them have hobbies, families,
responsibilities, etc, and I respect that. But for the rest of us who have
chosen personal business success as our long term goal and aren't particularly
intelligent, we should not feel guilty for our 80 hour weeks. Sometimes it is
just plain necessary. Stupid if it doesn't work out. But necessary if it is to
work out.

~~~
HillaryBriss
Thank you for sharing your honest, unvarnished perspective. A prediction: if
you do earn a ton of money and become really wealthy, lots and lots of people
will think you are brilliant or even a genius.

In the mean time: how do you stay motivated to work the long hours? How do you
maintain mental focus for extended durations?

~~~
lostctown
Ha, I'm sure it's different for different folks but I attribute my lack of
burning out (knock on wood) to caring about what I do beyond a paycheck. That
and leaving town for a weekend every month or so to tune everything out and
evaluate my progress really helps. I get down when I'm unsure that my time is
being well spent. Re-evaluating my trajectory often does wonders to keep those
emotions in check.

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walshemj
I knew about F international I never knew that she started at Dollis hill GPO
research which was the Bit of BT I worked in

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anovikov
Something looks strange here. I thought in 1960s, coding was supposed to be
women's profession - it was tedious and didn't make money - perfect example of
what a sexist would expect a woman to do. Only in 1970s when some people
started to strike it rich through coding, men flocked there and women in that
field became ridiculed.

~~~
Kimitri
I suppose the thing that was peculiar at the time was that she was a female
entrepreneur doing business in a male dominated industry. Women were probably
seen as secretaries and in other ”supporting” roles (like coding) but ”big
business” was dealt by men. Unfortunately, we’ve still not left that world
behind.

~~~
new2628
What about all the male car mechanics?

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vipref
This is fancy

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avinium
"...in the 1960s, women couldn’t legally drive a bus or even open a bank
account without their husband’s permission."

It would be laughable, if only it weren't so sad.

Funny how we decry Islam for the oppression of women, when only a few decades
ago we weren't much better.

~~~
spaginal
Yet we aren’t any longer and they still are. What’s your point?

~~~
avinium
No point other than that it’s easy to forget that Western “enlightenment” is a
very recent development.

That’s not to equivocate bank account restrictions with being stoned for
adultery. Or that we shouldn’t push for even moderate Islamic countries to
adopt liberal policies towards women’s rights.

It’s just an interesting perspective on Western history that gets lost on the
moral high ground.

~~~
tim333
Also the Islamic countries seem to be changing in the same direction. eg from
Pinker

>Polls find that young Muslims in the Middle East are about as liberal as
young western Europeans were in the early 1960s.

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viscanti
> but paywalled

Thanks for calling this out. As a fellow internet user I share your believe
that we're entitled to high quality FREE journalism. If content providers
wanted to get paid they should do something else. We don't care that they're
trying to run a business, we're internet users and we DEMAND they give us
everything for free.

~~~
dang
Please see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)
and don't post like this here.

Also
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)
if you need more.

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20184800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20184800)
and marked it off-topic.

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toephu2
The real story here is msn.com is still around? A relic from the 1990s.

~~~
dang
It contributes its share.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=msn.com%20points%3E30&sort=byD...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=msn.com%20points%3E30&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

