This can be read as a story of what happens when management becomes divorced from engineering... literally.<p>>Lore Harp and Carole Ely of Westlake Village brought along the Vector 1, a PC designed by Lore's husband, Bob Harp.<p>>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.<p>>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.<p>>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.<p>>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.<p>>The company filed for bankruptcy in 1985, ceased operations in 1986, and a holding company liquidated all its assets [...] in 1987
"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."<p>What made Apple SO different from all the others that failed?
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.<p>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].<p>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. ;)<p>[1] <a href="http://htius.com/Articles/r12ham.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://htius.com/Articles/r12ham.pdf</a><p>(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.)<p>[2] <a href="http://www.htius.com/News_Links/251093main_The_NASA_Heritage_Of_Creativity.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.htius.com/News_Links/251093main_The_NASA_Heritage...</a><p>(see page 13 for specific principles she derived)<p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist%29" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist...</a>
Many parallels can be seen between the founders of Vector Halt and the Clarks in the Halt and Catch Fire series.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWrioRji60A" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWrioRji60A</a>
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.)<p>You could, of course use the monitor to disassemble the monitor, which was a good way to learn assembly language.<p>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.<p>Wrote several video games in Z80 for that machine, although graphics were limited to TRS-80 style 6-pixels-per-character.<p>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.
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.
Imagine what the industry would have looked like if IBM locked down its hardware, so that nobody could develop an OS for it.<p>Or if they started an app store.
>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?
tangential: the cover (<a href="http://b.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline/2015/07/3047428-inline-popularelectronics.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://b.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline/...</a>) 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 ...