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How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry (2015)

233 点作者 edtechdev超过 3 年前

22 条评论

ThinkBeat超过 3 年前
I find the headline to be promise more than it delivered.<p>A women had a husband (Bob) who was a genius at design and developing hardware accessories and later a full computer. He had little interest in running the business.<p>His work created a hardware company called Vector Computers.<p>His wife and another woman ran the business aspect of the company and the company did well.<p>It did well thanks to the husband&#x27;s identification of a huge market that offered a lot of opportunity.<p>The company grew and this is certainly a credit for the two female executives. They were pioneers both as female executives and within getting in early in the computer industry.<p>Once Bob learned about this soon to be released IBM PC he requested and begged the company to start making IBM PC clones and accessories. He said the company had a year left unless it started embracing the PC<p>The now soon to be ex wife rejected this idea and kept the company running the same as always. She also fired her soon to be ex-husband.<p>She did take the company public within that year and was generous allotting stocks to every employee in the company. That was also a first.<p>I hope everyone sold their stock as soon as they could, given that the company died 2 years later. Because they are failed to adapt to a changing market and rejected advice of the technical founder and the guy who identified the market segment they started in.
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redm超过 3 年前
This was a fun read and a great story.<p>I&#x27;m sure this will get downvoted since its not PC (pun intended), but I feel like the title should read &quot;Two Bored 1970&#x27;s Housewives, and an engineer Husband, Helped Create the PC Industry.&quot; The wives had the time and desire, and the husband had the skill and idea[1], just not the time or risk tolerance. I don&#x27;t see how these can be separated, considering he was the Chief Engineer and created most of the products too. [2]<p>[1] &quot;Bob Harp’s memory board worked well, and he recognized that it could serve as a lucrative commercial product. Lacking the time and resources to commercialize it, he put it on the back burner for almost a year. But in 1976, when his wife and Ely were trying to hatch a business, he offered his Altair memory board as a potential product&quot;.<p>[2] &quot;Losing the engineer who had designed almost all of its hardware products since 1976 was a huge blow for Vector.&quot;
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vegardx超过 3 年前
A colleague of mine got started programming because her fancy sewing machine was programmed using Cobol or Fortran.<p>It&#x27;s really fun to hear stories about when she quite literally just started showing up at Oslo University to sneak into classes because she found it so fun.<p>Now she&#x27;s maintaining one of our mainframes at work. Extremely knowledgeable and kind. The kind of person you feel lucky to know.
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leejoramo超过 3 年前
Around 1983 my Eagle Scout project was to get computers for students at the Elementary School I had attended in central California. One of the companies that presented their systems was Vector.<p>Their demo was the first time I got to play with an S-100. I remember they sent a woman from their corporate offices and an African American salesperson to talk to me. That meeting always shaped for me an expectation of diversity in the workplace.<p>Looking back, I wonder if the woman at the demo was Lore or Carole<p>Vector was too expensive for my project. I did end up getting three Apple ][‘s for student use and a HeathKit CP&#x2F;M system for the office. The school ended up being the first elementary school in the school district to give students access to computers.
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heurisko超过 3 年前
Similar story in the UK, &quot;Freelance Programmers&quot; was created with the primary workforce of mothers with a technical background.<p>The creator of the company, (now Dame) Stephanie Shirley, wrote about it in her memoirs &quot;Let it Go&quot;, which I can recommend.<p>They eventually had to hire men, due to equality legislation. The attraction for women, however, was that they could work from home. Seems we have come full circle.
wumms超过 3 年前
&gt; The following year, Bob founded Corona Data Systems [0], which created one of the first IBM PC clones.<p>One of their ads is titled &quot;The Apple vs. IBM debate is over. Meet the Winner.&quot; [1]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Corona_Data_Systems" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Corona_Data_Systems</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;aDe5mkD" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;aDe5mkD</a>
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khazhoux超过 3 年前
&gt; “We were bored doing the housewife thing,” recalls Ely today. “I was ready to be something.”<p>I find it interesting how it&#x27;s generally acceptable for women to insult other women who choose to devote their time to raising a family. I mean, I get her point but the quote above is demeaning as hell.<p>Since that&#x27;s not likely to end anytime soon, I suppose it&#x27;d be funny to see the insults fly in the other direction. Like, stating how &quot;working moms&quot; are kidding themselves that they have a full mother-child relationship. They&#x27;ve out-sourced a critical and singular relationship to paid employees (the nanny -- assuming their spouse also works). They don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s going on in their kids&#x27; lives, they don&#x27;t know who in school is bullying them, they don&#x27;t know which kids are getting into drugs, they only know the very surface of what their kids are dealing with. They&#x27;re lying to themselves to think they can both kick ass at work and as a parent. They sacrificed precious childhood years of emotional, mental, and life guidance, in exchange for their paycheck.<p>None of the above is cool to say. But it&#x27;s definitely OK to demean in the other direction.<p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;m a male parent, working full-time, wife quit her job when kids were born. She has never regretted the decision, and is always super busy and never &quot;bored.&quot; And me, I know 100% there&#x27;s an experience I&#x27;ve sadly forever missed of spending time with my kids, especially pre-WFH.
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brunovianna超过 3 年前
it sounds just like the plot to halt and catch fire <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...</a>
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shusaku超过 3 年前
&gt; Lore and Carole’s emphasis on visual aesthetics led them to offer this choice of colors at a time when many companies gave little thought to what their computers looked like<p>Looking at their designs in the article, they just ooze cool.
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AlbertCory超过 3 年前
The comments below about Apple, Wozniak, Jobs, et al are right. Those stories have been done to death. There were a lot of other people <i>not</i> at Apple who were making fun, vital contributions to the PC industry, and I&#x27;m working on a post about another one that almost no one remembers (teaser).<p>A Silicon Valley legend was Dennis Barnhart [1], who crashed the Ferrari that he&#x27;d bought with his IPO money for Eagle Computer (remember them? I thought not.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1983&#x2F;06&#x2F;10&#x2F;business&#x2F;corporate-triumph-then-death-in-a-ferrari.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1983&#x2F;06&#x2F;10&#x2F;business&#x2F;corporat...</a>
johnx123-up超过 3 年前
FWIW... related article: The Rise and Decline of Vector Graphic : Management Mistakes and IBM Crush Couple’s Computer Venture (1985) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;la-xpm-1985-08-20-fi-2173-story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;la-xpm-1985-08-20-fi-2173-s...</a>
tromp超过 3 年前
&gt; Vector’s board convinced Lore to return as president and CEO. She began commuting over with an 800-mile round trip every day from her home in San Francisco.<p>How is that even possible? Two flights every day?
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kwertyoowiyop超过 3 年前
There are a lot more stories like this that would be great to unearth, rather than continuing to focus on the Jobs&#x2F;Wozniak story. Much as I did love my ][!
dang超过 3 年前
A couple of past threads:<p><i>How Two Bored 1970s Housewives Helped Create the PC Industry (2015)</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16249920" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16249920</a> - Jan 2018 (29 comments)<p><i>How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9929333" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9929333</a> - July 2015 (69 comments)
severak_cz超过 3 年前
I hope some of the retrotech youtubers create showdown of Vector computer (or S-100 based machine in general). There seems to be one demo[0], &quot;vector graphics&quot; is too generic search term.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4EXN6j0TZv4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4EXN6j0TZv4</a>
eloeffler超过 3 年前
Outrun by a bored college dropout and his friend
musicale超过 3 年前
&gt; The only consumer PC company that survived into the 1990s with its own significant platform was Apple, and even then, just barely.<p>Commodore was probably still &quot;significant&quot; in 1990.<p>Acorn&#x27;s platforms were fairly successful into the 1990s, and of course you can still run RISC OS (first released in 1994) today on a modern Raspberry Pi!<p>On the hardware architecture side of course, ARM has simply taken over the world - including Apple.
nodejs_rulez_1超过 3 年前
<i>&gt; She found her talents wasting while her kids spent their days in class and her husband did the 9-to-5 at Hughes.</i><p>Back then they did not know that moms are heroes and being a mom is a full-time job.
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franhield超过 3 年前
Great read; we can say that imagination is the limit for a skilled programmer—great idea combined with skill results in a good outcome.
MrBuddyCasino超过 3 年前
&gt; Lore Harp and Carole Ely of Westlake Village brought along the Vector 1, a PC designed by Lore’s husband, Bob Harp.<p>Interesting choice of headline.
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amwelles超过 3 年前
Why can’t this headline say “two women?” Big yuck.
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CyberRabbi超过 3 年前
“PC” is an IBM specific marketing term. The computers made by Vector Graphic were not PCs, they were microcomputers. The correct generic term is microcomputer, e.g. the Apple II was a microcomputer, never a PC. This naming convention persists today, it’s unusual to refer to a Mac as a PC.<p>It’s a small detail but it’s an important one and makes it seem like this article was poorly researched or the title is clickbait. Vector Graphic never entered the PC industry though they may have helped create the microcomputer industry.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vector_Graphic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vector_Graphic</a>
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