
How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry - technologizer
http://www.fastcompany.com/3047428/how-two-bored-1970s-housewives-helped-create-the-pc-industry
======
zeteo
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

~~~
comrade1
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.

~~~
danmaz74
> 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

Actually, they could have done what one of the founders suggested, and
actually did after leaving the company: create an IBM compatible system.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems)

~~~
drfuchs
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.

~~~
danmaz74
Yeah; just think if the same product had been sold by the well-known Vector
Graphics brand :)

------
Zikes
I got through the first paragraph before the whole page was replaced with an
interstitial ad.

What would you call that, Flash Of Actual Content?

------
spikej
"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?

~~~
smacktoward
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.

~~~
leoc
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](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.)

------
lkrubner
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.

------
nickpsecurity
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. ;)

[1]
[http://htius.com/Articles/r12ham.pdf](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...](http://www.htius.com/News_Links/251093main_The_NASA_Heritage_Of_Creativity.pdf)

(see page 13 for specific principles she derived)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist%29)

------
jamespitts
Many parallels can be seen between the founders of Vector Halt and the Clarks
in the Halt and Catch Fire series.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWrioRji60A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWrioRji60A)

~~~
rasz_pl
no nono nooooo, dont remind people about that terrible pop show with no
respect of history or technology.

They say things like "Atari 420ST" on that show.

------
j_s
If this era interests you, be sure to catch A&E's 'Halt and Catch Fire',
although in my opinion the second season is heading downhill.

~~~
Apocryphon
Two brief thoughts about HCF:

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.

------
amelius
Imagine what the industry would have looked like if IBM locked down its
hardware, so that nobody could develop an OS for it.

Or if they started an app store.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

------
Nano2rad
>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?

~~~
mhurron
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.

~~~
mark-r
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.

------
mark-r
Not only did Vector Graphic build complete systems, they also sold components.
My first computer had their Z80 processor board at its core.

------
asher
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.

------
bluedino
I love hearing the stories about the also-rans of the computer business. Many
fortunes to be made and lost back then.

~~~
VSpike
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](http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/fixed_pages/swtp.html)
who I found via the wonderful alt.folklore.computers newsgroup.

------
trhway
tangential: the cover
([http://b.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline/...](http://b.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline/2015/07/3047428-inline-
popularelectronics.jpg)) 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 ...

------
leroy_masochist
I need this as a semi-historically-accurate Kirsten Wiig / Amy Schumer buddy
comedy, and I need it yesterday.

