It's like a story from an alternate version of reality - I think of all the articles I've read touting 'the two Steves', and this is the first time I've read about Lore Harp McGovern.
the only "Osborne" I can think of off the top of my head is the fictional Norman Osborne (aka the Green Goblin) [and I guess to be fair his equally fictional son Harry Osborne]
> ... CP/M for the in-development Vector 4. Switching would potentially mean redesigning the next line of machines.
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.
I just wanted to say that the framing of this intro is really, really good. Kudos to the author, who is knocking this series out of the park—hell of a writer.
I remember seeing a Vector Graphics computer at a computer store around 1978, when I was shopping for my first computer. I was excited by the name Vector Graphics, only to be disappointed to learn that it was a meaningless name, and their computers had nothing to do with vectors or graphics. I vaguely remember that it was a generic business machine (maybe with a 16 bit version?) with nothing to recommend it to a hobbyist over the competition.
In that era Apple had an enormous lead in graphics, software, and peripheral cards.
Yeah, the small business system integrator business was really different back then. Especially before Visicalc (1979), which opened a lot of doors for Apple. A profile of that segment of the pre-IBM-PC industry would be fascinating and would put Vector in the right context.
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.
It’s not just that she overcame odds as a woman in the tech business that amazes, but that she was so clearly someone who cared about people, and chose to risk her business and reputation more than once to stay true to her values. That’s perhaps even more rare in this industry than being a successful female CEO.
Something I didn't have space to mention in the piece was that during the recession of the early eighties, Vector went out of their way to support their dealer network.
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.
Thanks for the article. Benji Edwards's earlier article was the first time I really became aware of Vector's existence. There are noticeably fewer mentions of the company in Freiberger and Swaine's Fire in the Valley (1984) than, say, Cromemco, and far fewer than IMSAI.
there are no odds as a woman in the tech business. The tech industry is on of the most inclusive industries because it measures talent and value creation not features no one can do anything about
I'm a third generation "woman in tech" (grandma did punch cards, mom did COBOL) and I haven't had any problems that I keep being told I'm supposed to have. I suspect discrimination is location specific. The most I get is the annoying "you guys..." pause to think "...and gal".
> Every tech company on the planet is tripping over themselves to hire/promote more minorities
That is because of the problems than have been mounting in tech because people only hired people that looked like them.
I do not understand what the problem is with DEI. (I am not in the USA, perhaps I am missing out). Making sure that no one is left behind, because they were over looked, seems like a good thing to me.
That's a real problem. People want to hire people that are just like them. Same school, same degree, same personality, same age, same political affiliation. I have seen the bias for the same race and gender, and not just white on white but with all races selecting their own, although that's on the down low.
I don't know what the current MO of DEI programs is, but I hope they're expansive by also targeting ageism and other present day discriminations.
> Making sure that no one is left behind, because they were over looked, seems like a good thing to me.
This sound a lot like the "just asking questions", esp because of the "seems like a good thing to me" bit, like you know it's a mischaracterisation of the problem.
If you really don't understand, read what people write.
If all you believe DEI is what you characterised as above, then you aren't reading any dissenting opinion.
Yeah, I absolutely agree. The problem is that DEI programs are actually just hiring speakers 40 grand a pop to come tell me about all the ways I am racist without even realizing it just for being white. Literally skipping a meeting about microaggressions as we speak.
It is useless marketing bullshit that serves only to enrich the race grifters that plague our society.
(I will say this is a bit of an extreme take, there are definitely genuine DEI people, probably some effective DEI programs, etc, but by and large, as an industry [which it is] it is completely shiesty)
When you start hiring people because of who they are, and not what they can do, it won't be long before that shows in the results you get. DEI has effectively replaced competence with identity politics.
Well "unconscious bias" is a vapid meaningless term with no real concrete definition. It is essentially a political cudgel used to accuse someone of racism for which there is no evidence.
To be fair I have never seen a hiring decision made on DEI grounds. its always talent/skill first. So I am not complaining about bullshit DEI hiring, I am complaining about programs where companies hire speakers for absurd fees to come give lipservice to cool black culture is and how shitty white people are. Its such an obvious scam and its painful to watch everyone get brow beaten into public self flagellation.
That was great and really piqued my interest. I remember reading Byte magazine (late 70s and early 80s) and the pages and pages of adverts for machines similar to the Vector; peripherals, compilers, and softwarein the same work satation category.
I’d love to read more about these products and their history. It was all very opaque. Even back then.
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')
"unforgivable level of puffery" seems like an overreaction.
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.
The rather balanced 1985 LA Times article posted by lr1970 ought to be instructive for the folks here that think the year zero was sometime in their late adolescence or early adulthood. There has been a hunger for the "women beating all odds" story for a long time now. From it:
>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.
Interestingly enough the empire fell when the Vector 4 suffered the same fate of Commodore (albeit later) when the Vector 4 specs were leaked. Although, there were a few blunders on the wikipedia page but this was also indicative of the era during the IBM PC / DOS dominance.
Yeah - one thing that didn't make the edit unfortunately was a few paragraphs on this. They'll make the book chapter though, when I write that.
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.
This story of Carole Ely and Lore Harp reminded me a little of the (fictional) women in Halt and Catch Fire. Fantastic show. I wonder if Vector Graphic was an inspiration for the writers.
This is further afield, but it reminded me of the novel A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. The protagonist is an Englishwoman who inherits a legacy and uses it to open businesses that employ the women of an Australian outpost.
I was trying to remember this exact show to comment on... fantastic show, exciting and fairly accurate (to fiction terms) depiction of rise of PC & internet.
"Vector was late in moving from machines with 8K processing to 16K, which had become the new industry standard." I was interested in S100 bus machines, but couldn't afford one! If I'd only known, I'd have borrowed to buy a Vector Graphic S100 back then, just for the novelty of having an 8192-bit CPU! ;-)
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.
My funniest Vector 3 repair was a client running Memorite (for lawyers a kick ass word processor for its time, think daisywheel monospace Courier/Elite printers) where the spelling of words flipped 'off by 2 letters' on the display as they edited. I knew the mapping for the S-100 memory card by heart and all the memory chips were in sockets, so I was able to go right to the chip in question and re-seat it to show them it ended the problem. Then I re-seated them all. Great work for a 16 year old!
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!
I don't know what methodology Shirley's company used. But yes, Teletype machines were very common in the mid-1960s.
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.
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."
No, you just need a boss you can trust. You need to not be a clock puncher of an employee. You need to be present (in an office) for these conversations to happen.
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.
I’ve had (and honored) plenty of those types of conversations with subordinates I’ve never met in person in any of a number of global offices. Physical presence isn’t a prerequisite for being a good boss or worker.
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 appreciate your experience and perspective, but it is simply not mine. If anything, I've gotten the impression that it's somewhat easier for the subordinate having a level of "abstraction" in the form of email/Teams/Zoom/etc., but of course that requires a commitment on my part as a leader to adjust my approach to that environment (and, given it's the environment I've spent the most time in as a leader and as a subordinate, that's easy).
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.
Im calling BS. Plenty of managers are in over their head. Plenty of managers are focused on their next career move. Plenty of managers will only play lip service to "culture" or worse "family" and after one slack DM from management completely fold over.
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.
I just looked up Wikipedia on teleprinters and had no idea they went back as far as 1887. My school had an ASR 33 Teletype linked to a PDP-10 in the 1970s which seemed kind of antique even then, although it worked ok.
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
I remember our group of students would chip in on flowers and chocolates for the girl who was punching the cards. Every mistake meant manually cutting new holes and mask taping the extra holes to arrive at the correct character.
Write the program down on paper, then type it in or punch cards.
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.
We had a single apple II at our school. It was responsible for me failing most of my classes and getting into programming.
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.
I found something in German which has a little bit in it, but
sadly interviewers where not tech managers and didn't ask the
right questions in several interviews I've read.
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.
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.
I do believe there are unique challenges to being a woman in tech, but the odds seem in favor of women doing well both back in the 70's and today with todays stats having roughly 20% of CS grads being female while some 23% of SWEs are female. That suggests there are more women in software jobs than women who have been pursing that career academically. What stats do you see that suggest the odds are against women in tech? I frequently recommend tech as a good field for young girls, but I'll probably not do that anymore if the odds are truly against them.
How ist 20%/23% good? Am I reading the numbers wrong? 40%, that I could agree on. But 23% is very low.
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.
23% > 20% which means if someone goes into the field of computer programming they're more likely to remain in the field if they are a woman than if they are a man. "remain in the field" is used as a proxy for success.
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
Does it really say that or are women just slightly more probable to enter the field without a degree?
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.
> they're more likely to remain in the field if they are a woman
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).
consider that a lot of the culture in tech is also there for the first four years of undergrad, and so 23% often represents the people who basically made it through four years. are people who have experienced it for four years likelier to put up with more of the same?
well I'm not making a value judgement, but we're talking about odds, not "good" or "bad"...if 20% of women go after a software job and the field is made up of an even higher %, that suggests the odds are amazing for women. Odds don't tell the whole story, but the odds seem in women's favor at the moment.
If you define odds being good as "the odds are good for the ones that choose to study CS", sure. But if you define the odds as "women overall", 20% is a relatively poor number in my opinion. Yes, we're getting better and yes, it takes time. But I don't think we can pat ourselves on the back here. That the women who decide to work on tech do well is (in my very unscientific and unproven) opinion just an indicator that the women who do join tech are on average more skilled than the men who decide to join tech.
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.
These assumptions and stats are virtually meaningless.
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.
> Every human being, man or woman, has unique challenges.
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.
Women are kicking ass because they kick ass, not because men are "helping" by viewing them as disabled. Ask any successful woman if she needs your help. Lol. Individuality is more important than your labeling by a huge margin.
Recognising and actively working to dismantle issues of systemic bias against women isn't viewing women as disabled.
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 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.
Your daughter isn't "women." My commentary isn't about changing the world. It's about providing the practical tools for individual success. Focusing on individual advantages, rationally and with careful planning, produces results. Their sex isn't really something to focus on when compared with the majority of other hurdles having a dramatically larger impact in their life. They should focus on things they can act on if you want them to be successful.
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.
> Every human being, man or woman, has unique challenges.
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.
Yes. Including homelessness, disease, religious background, language, distance from an opportunity, nationality, sexual orientation, financial stability of their parents, lack of lottery winnings or inheritance, mental acuity or lack there of, mental disorder, physical deformity, and indeed sex. And combinations of those and etc.'s that I didn't think of.
Everyone has countless reasons to fail. Sex is by far among the smallest of those reasons.
Yes, exactly. And therefore it has the least impact on the individual.
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.
Would be nice if it were higher, for sure. And it will become that way, because more women go to college now than men. Will we care about young men being under represented in college before they get down to 20%? I'd like to think so, but I won't take that bet.
> Will we care about young men being under represented in college before they get down to 20%?
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.
> go to college now than men. Will we care about young men
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.
That's one explanation. The other is women just have to be better to survive the CS education so if they do, they are going to be better than average. Certainly true for a bunch of female SWEs I have worked with
Can you see that you've completely dismissed the lived experiences of many many women, brushing them aside with whatever statistics you could find?
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.
I'd like to see that rate adjusted for people who were hobby programmers before they started. I suspect more boys than girls do programming before college, and that having done programming before college helps people not to drop out. I believe that the key to increasing diversity in tech is to increase the diversity in kids who are programming for fun. I have previously supported Black Girls Code for this reason.
Isn't it kind of depressing that it's virtually and effectively impossible for anyone to replicate a comparable success story like this in 2024, short of maybe being a billionaire nepo baby?
To be fair, the fame of Steve Jobs is some of a different story: after his departure from Apple, he had been kind of a persona non grata, and later, with the demise of NeXT (BTW also known for its flat hierarchy and salary structure), not much talked about, either. It was really with the resurgence of Apple and Jobs' 3rd or 4th comeback that he became idolized, especially after the iPhone. This is quite a biography, and it took 30 years and rebuilding the then most valuable company from what seemed to be its sure ruin to achieve this popularity.
I was just a teen when Jobs becaome iCEO at Apple. It felt like a big deal and the only thing that could have made it bigger was if Woz stepped on stage as well. It really did have the air of the band getting back together. At least that was the case for the Apple faithful.
On the other hand, Jean-Louis Gassée was well remembered and there had been high expectations regarding an integration of BeOS, and even rumours of Sun maybe acquiring Apple. Compared to this, Jobs' return felt much like a "small (village) solution" with vague prospects to some. (Notably, this notion of "small" is somewhat ironical, given that Apple had been once one of the most successful startups in US corporate history, second only to Xerox.)
I couldn't tell you the names of the founders of contemporary PC builders like North Star or Cromemco, either. But that's just because none of them lasted more than a decade or so.
Even the founders of Commodore, which was 10x more successful, are not household names.
E.g., Ken Olsen is hardly a household name, founder of DEC, once the second largest and hugely influential computer company, and, while staying modest, then the second richest individual in the US. (If you are using an interactive computer, you're sitting on the shoulders of what DEC built.) Also (among those who do know him) well known for flat hierarchies and his support for a diverse group of employees. (DEC even founded a dedicated bank, which is still in operation, when employees faced problems with applications for mortgages and credits on the free market, often for racial bias.)
> she is cast as a villain ("Ice Queen") and relegated to a footnote in history.
The company failed for multiple reasons and some of those were a result of sexism. So, I wouldn't say it was the sole cause for their decline.
> She told Harp that one man had complained to her about “the awful bitch who was running the company."
While Jobs and to some extent Gates were called eccentric geniuses for all their misdeeds in their early years, I have no doubts on what Harp & Ely would be called if they attempted to do even half of the bad things Jobs and Gates did.
It's kind of gross and sophomoric to try and portray eg the Harp's relationship in terms of good and evil. I can't imagine that you would characterize their relationship in the same way if the roles were reversed, and what does direct beneficiary even mean in this context? Money was rolling in so suck it up?
> Her company, and it's legacy, ultimately destroyed by men
> A portrait of the insidious nature of sexism.
A tad ironic to make these two statements in succession don't you think?
I'm not saying that sexism doesn't or didn't exist (especially in that time period), but trying to dismiss the discrepancy on Wikipedia as sexism, when Jobs helped build a literal worldwide business empire that is Apple of today, doesn't help your case at all. In fact it's the opposite, it sounds like you're fighting windmills.
>A tad ironic to make these two statements in succession don't you think?
Where's the irony? You'll have to point it out to me.
> As a result, Harp McGovern had the opportunity to see, sooner than most other companies, what Microsoft was adding to its own operating system in an effort to capture the market.
> It was a switch that Harp McGovern herself was inclined to make, so she contacted Gates and negotiated a provisional contract for Vector to pivot to using DOS instead of CP/M on far sweeter terms—and at a much faster pace—than were being offered to other manufacturers. “We had an amazing relationship with Microsoft. I’d signed a contract where every update and every new system in perpetuity we would get at no increased royalty,“ she explained.
> The deal was taken to the board, but the collective decision was made that it was better to stick with the known quantity that was CP/M for the in-development Vector 4.
She negotiated a sweetheart deal with Microsoft before their big break. She had a personal relationship with Bill Gates. This decision killed the company.
> but trying to dismiss the discrepancy on Wikipedia as sexism, when Jobs helped build a literal worldwide business empire that is Apple of today, doesn't help your case at all. In fact it's the opposite,
The final line was a summary of the article as a whole, not specifically the difference between Jobs' legacy and hers. I recognize the difference.
> Where's the irony? You'll have to point it out to me.
> The deal was taken to the board, but the collective decision was made that it was better to stick with the known quantity that was CP/M for the in-development Vector 4.
Because, if you find it relevant what the sex of the board members that made that mistake was, how is that any better than the alleged sexism that McGovern had endured? If you think that, you must also think that a board consisting mainly (or fully) of women that makes some mistake has to do with them being women, right?
> Because, if you find it relevant what the sex of the board members that made that mistake was, how is that any better than the alleged sexism that McGovern had endured?
You've done some subtle editorializing here to try and make your point stronger, allow me to correct it:
> ultimately destroyed by men
is not what I wrote, what I wrote is
> ultimately destroyed by the men who overrode her decisions and opted to take the 'safer' route.
They convey two very different ideas. The strawman that you wrote implies that I believe men, by virtue of their sex, are responsible for the companies failure. This is not the case.
What I wrote implies that the board rejected her proposal because they thought they know better. Is it conceivable to you that this belief might have had something to do with the fact that she was a female CEO, formerly a housewife, in an exclusively male industry?
Surely you can concede that identifying sexist behavior and committing sexist behavior are not equivalent.
I don't think the article portrays the decision as disrespectful or disregarding of Lore's opinion, just that they took the wrong bet on the future.
While she says later on that she made a mistake not "forcing" that route following her instinct, I read that as a classic leadership dilemma where your gut says go one way but plenty of data disagrees. She is the visionary in this story, and visionaries often struggle with the hard routes their visions suggest and don't always follow them.
IBM made the opposite bet, against CP/M. This was a bold and risky decision at the time because CP/M was massively dominant in business. It was anything but assured that DOS would win.
> Their own husbands were resentful of their success. Despite being direct beneficiaries of it.
What partner, male or female, isn't resentful of that kind of success even when benefitting from it? To get there requires a complete domination of time and, it turns out, partners tend to dislike being ignored. Since you mentioned Steve Jobs, there is much the same story about the mother of his first child. Their relationship is told to have come to an end because Jobs was putting all of his attention on Apple instead, and she also expressed feeling unacknowledged for her contributions to the Apple story.
If you dig into the lives of any successful founder on that kind of level, it is likely you will find the same story over and over, regardless of gender. Nothing unusual here.
being married to a person and your job is one marriage too many. Divorce and unhappy relationships are very common when one person becomes obsessed with work and the other is left in the cold.
Sorry but that's just false for a huge number of successful male CEOs who not only have stable marriages with supportive wives, but even that the model of the ideal (male) CEO is one in a stable marriage/with a family as part of the "personal brand."
The hard fact is that many straight men even today are all about supporting their female partners until they actually have to take a back seat. The hostility toward Lore's success displayed by her first husband was the norm overwhelmingly then and still common today.
For a more balanced contemporary (from 1985) depiction of the Vector story, see [0]. Basically, Bob Harp was the main technical force behind all Vector products, akin to Steve Wozniak at early Apple. In 1982 Bob and Lore could not agree who should be running the company and Bob left. Soon thereafter Vector deflated.
Moreover, the company he founded made a succesful pivot to making IBM PC clones and outlasted Vector. Whether the sale to Daewoo represents a succesful exit is perhaps debatable.
Women are also resentful of their partner's success and their egos can not take it.
The paragraph you quoted, Ely's husband sounds jealous of the attention she got and her control over the company. That can happen in any kind of partnership.
You're dragging up sexism, where it is not the primary problem. Why?
You can go into a tirade of how women when achieving the same role as men are treated differently. But then you would be ignoring the underlying roles both were MEANT to play.
The man is meant to play the role of breadwinner. If he can’t do that, he is not seen as worthy. The women is meant to play the role of housemaker. If she can’t do that, she is seen as incompetent.
But if the other outshines the one at their meaningful role, it creates tension. It creates lack of confidence. It creates environments where the person feels small.
“I need to take care of the kids and therefore can’t go to conference” for men is equivalent to “I need to go to the conference and therefore can’t stay home” for women. Both are negatives based on the role they play.
If you want to create a new world where the roles are switched, or where both put equal time in doing both domestic and professional tasks, you would be ignoring their biological, physical, and mental strengths.
The last bit that makes the whole issue worrisome, male social circles are competitive on achievements rather than perceptions, While female social circles are vice versa.
There is a world where women can be successful and pioneering. It exists. But it doesn’t exist if there needs to be a tectonic shift. Like in the case here. And in the case of most normative systems where men and women play designated roles.
You can go into a tirade of how women when achieving the same role as men are treated differently. But then you would be ignoring the underlying roles both were MEANT to play.
The man is meant to play the role of breadwinner. If he can’t do that, he is not seen as worthy. The women is meant to play the role of housemaker. If she can’t do that, she is seen as incompetent.
But if the other outshines the one at their meaningful role, it creates tension. It creates lack of confidence. It creates environments where the person feels small.
“I need to take care of the kids and therefore can’t go to conference” for men is equivalent to “I need to go to the conference and therefore can’t stay home” for women. Both are negatives based on the role they play.
If you want to create a new world where the roles are switched, or where both put equal time in doing both domestic and professional tasks, you would be ignoring their biological, physical, and mental strengths.
The last bit that makes the whole issue worrisome, male social circles are competitive on achievements rather than perceptions, While female social circles are vice versa.
There is a world where women can be successful and pioneering. It exists. But it doesn’t exist if there needs to be a tectonic shift. Like in the case here. And in the case of most normative systems where men and women play designated roles.
Perceiving old systems that grew up on essential dedicated roles based on biology as sexist is a modern day bias against old eras that needs its own verbiage: time-ism?
Not to go into debate, but my overall outlook is that certain relational contracts are embedded in the formation of relationships. Drifting from those contracts creates a rift. This isn’t essentialism. This is expectationism.
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"?
> Behind every successful woman is a man, who tried to stop her
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.
