10 ms·

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

233 points by edtechdev 5y ago

brunovianna 5y ago
it sounds just like the plot to halt and catch fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
- wumms 5y ago
  You're right: "In the first season of the TV series, Halt and Catch Fire, a fictional drama depicting the birth of the personal computer industry in the 1980s, the pivot of company Cardiff Electric resembles both the history of Corona Data Systems and Compaq." [0] (Corona Data Systems was co-founded by Robert Harp) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems
- vimy 5y ago
  I really hope Apple will make a folklore.org show in the style of Halt and Catch Fire.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    It's been done though with HCF, why would anyone but superfans want to see the same thing again?
    - Kye 5y ago
      It's not unusual for there to be many fictional treatments of the same history/source material.
      - apetresc 5y ago
        Sure, but when it's the fourth or fifth treatment about the relatively recent founding of a single company that is still dominant in the present day, and that treatment is sponsored by the company in question, it comes off as self-serving.
    - Zelphyr 5y ago
      I'd love to see a dramatization of the making of the Macintosh. I read Revolution In The Valley not too long ago and it's fascinating to read about the personalities of the people who created that machine. I think it would be a nice compliment to Halt and Catch Fire--a Mac version to their PC-Compatible show.
      - vimy 5y ago
        Exactly this. I would love to see the Japanese Sony engineer hiding in the closet from Steve Jobs.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    I've been hoping for a Silicon Valley style dramedy series about the early days of open source. My headcasting for this has Donal Logue as Richard Stallman, Nick Offerman as Eric Raymond, and Cory Michael Smith as Linus.
nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
> She found her talents wasting while her kids spent their days in class and her husband did the 9-to-5 at Hughes. Back then they did not know that moms are heroes and being a mom is a full-time job.
- merliossu 5y ago
  they still dont know. the narrative pushed by most of the woke people is that it is slavery and demeaning to raise your children and that women would rather make powerpoints for some random white dude paid 40-70k$/year than be enslaved to raising children
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    The difference is payment of time in care work, and not just for childcare but also for other forms of care (disabled, elderly). Another very big issue is poverty. Time used for raising children doesn't count into pension payments, meaning that women who divorce from their husbands end up without anything in their name in the worst case.
    - monoideism 5y ago
      This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally found among the poor, just among middle class and up women (and men), typically left-leaning. Most poor mothers I've know would love to be stay-at-home moms because they're only working to survive and not for personal fulfillment, and because they love their kids.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        Many middle class women and up also do housekeeping and care work. People are just different, and not everyone finds fulfillment in working outside the home. In fact with the pandemic making it so much easier to work while staying at home, some of these women might choose to find such work.
      - mschuster91 5y ago
shusaku 5y ago
> 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 Looking at their designs in the article, they just ooze cool.
- thoughtsimple 5y ago
  My favorite is the 8k static memory board. It has 64 RAM chips which means each one comes in at a whopping 128 bytes or 1k bits.
vegardx 5y ago
A colleague of mine got started programming because her fancy sewing machine was programmed using Cobol or Fortran. It'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. Now she's maintaining one of our mainframes at work. Extremely knowledgeable and kind. The kind of person you feel lucky to know.
- bgmeister 5y ago
  Norsk Data machines?
  - unixhero 5y ago
    Current day mainframes in use in Norway would be IBM mainframes. Telenor, Nordea, DNB or Insurance companies...
- codetrotter 5y ago
  > sneak into classes All of the lectures at UiO are actually open to anyone as far as I know. You don’t need to be a student there or anything. You can just walk right in. And as long as you are quiet, and the room is not too full, I think it’s ok. But considering how inexpensive university education is in Norway, it may be an even better idea to sign up for classes because then you get to deliver assignments and get them graded and so on. Then again, when I attended university at UiO a lot of the intro classes were not inspiring. (And the same is probably true for most any university I think.) And I ended up not finishing my degree at UiO. So going to some lectures for the topics that you find the most interesting instead of enrolling as a student may not be such a bad idea either. One of the things I enjoyed the most about my time at UiO was this student union that was there. Lots of really skillful people were members of that student union and I learned quite a bit from some of them. I spent a lot of time in the location of that student union. In fact I can probably say, honestly, that I spent more time in that student union than I did in classes. Other members of that student union was also how I got to know about HN originally. This was over a decade ago now. It was a special place, and I am so happy that it existed and that I got to experience it. The building that we had our location in was eventually decommissioned and we got new location in a basement without windows. This killed the student union. No one wanted to hang out in a room deep down in a basement with no windows. And this new location was very inaccessible too, you had to walk through many corridors down in the basement to get to the room. Some of the people that had been doing the most for that student union started a new hacker space in Oslo. I’ve only been to the new hacker space a couple of times but it’s a pretty nice place too I think. The website of the student union continued to run on a server at UiO for several years after activity stopped, but the server went down a while back. I guess either the University Center for Information Technology (USIT) at UiO did a cleanup in the server rooms and found no one to speak to about the server, or they were informed that the student union was inactive, or the hardware in the server may have just malfunctioned after years of operation.
wumms 5y ago
> The following year, Bob founded Corona Data Systems [0], which created one of the first IBM PC clones. One of their ads is titled "The Apple vs. IBM debate is over. Meet the Winner." [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems [1] https://imgur.com/a/aDe5mkD https://imgur.com/a/aDe5mkD
- ghaff 5y ago
  One of those was the first PC I owned. The compatibility comment in the article was interesting. There was definitely a period when bug for bug PC compatibility was not widely appreciated by a lot of companies because it hadn't historically been a thing. Even Corona had a weird one-off monochrome graphics mode that basically no one supported (and made it incompatible with add-on graphics cards like Hercules). I think it's also easy for people to forget that in, say, 1982 if you were shopping for a computer a PC clone wasn't necessarily the obvious choice.
tromp 5y ago
> 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. How is that even possible? Two flights every day?
- adventured 5y ago
  Joe Biden did a three hour Amtrak trip (90 minutes each way) almost daily for 36 years for example. "Biden's apparently traveled over 2 million miles, the equivalent of four years of his life, on Amtrak." https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a32363173/joe-biden-amtrak-joe-meaning/ https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a32363173/joe-biden-amt...
  - srtjstjsj 5y ago
    That's only a third of the 800 mile commute.
    - adventured 5y ago
      I'm not sure what you're getting at. The distance by itself isn't particularly meaningful, the speed traveled + distance is. Amtrak is quite slow. Jetliners are ~4-8x faster.
- bityard 5y ago
  Back then, there was no TSA screening process that took 1-2 hours of waiting in line, planes were smaller, airports were less busy, flights left on time whether they were full or not, and you could smoke on the plane. It would have been pretty expensive unless she or the company negotiated some kind of discount with the airline but lots of people today quite regularly commute 2 hours or more one-way in their car or on the train, so...
  - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    Oh my god I completely forgot about stuff like the NY - DC shuttle. You could show up at LGA, walk up to the counter and buy a ticket for a flight that ran once an hour and be in the air literally within minutes. The last time I remember it being that easy was probably 9/13/2001. An ex-girlfriend was trying to get to DC from MSP because her father worked in the Pentagon and she hadn't heard from him. She called me from the airport in a panic at 2AM asking for help because her credit card was declined. I drove to the airport, groggily handed the ticket agent my card and drove back home. She was probably on the plane before I got home. Then a few weeks later came all the TSA crap...
nikkinana 5y ago
Stick to porn
eloeffler 5y ago
Outrun by a bored college dropout and his friend
megamix 5y ago
I love housewives
amwelles 5y ago
Why can’t this headline say “two women?” Big yuck.
- 55555 5y ago
  women = adult females bored 1970s housewives = bored adult females in the 1970s who have forgone a professional occupation to be a homemaker They used the latter because it's far more descriptive, and these facts are relevant to the article.
- astura 5y ago
  The title is literal, according to TFA the reason they started the company because they were bored with being housewives. >”I cannot stand being at home,” said Lore in a 1983 New York Times article. ”It drives me insane. Everybody thought I was strange because I would not go to the bridge club or have my fingernails done.” >Lore Harp met a kindred spirit in the form of a neighbor, Carole Ely, whose kids shared classes with the Harp children. Like Lore, she found the life of a homemaker wanting. “We were bored doing the housewife thing,” recalls Ely today. “I was ready to be something.” Just a few years prior, Ely had worked for large investment firms such as Merrill Lynch on the east coast, and she was itching to get back to business.
- fghfghfghfghfgh 5y ago
  Because the word "housewife" invokes a fuller mental image of what general boring conditions those two women might be living under?
- Bigpet 5y ago
  I too get offended when salient information to the story is part of the headline. I never want to read "Motorist kills 2 pedestrians", or "Policeofficer accused of planting evidence". It has to be "Person killed 2 other people" and "person accused of planting evidence" otherwise I am personally offended. Bigger yuck.
  - cptnapalm 5y ago
    Anyone else remember when journalists were on some strange anti-SUV crusade. "SUV crashes into pedestrians", "SUV runs off bridge", "5 killed by SUV". The titles really read like SUVs had been co-opted by Skynet and were causing all sorts of mayhem.
heurisko 5y ago
Similar story in the UK, "Freelance Programmers" was created with the primary workforce of mothers with a technical background. The creator of the company, (now Dame) Stephanie Shirley, wrote about it in her memoirs "Let it Go", which I can recommend. 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.
severak_cz 5y ago
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], "vector graphics" is too generic search term. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EXN6j0TZv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EXN6j0TZv4
MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
> Lore Harp and Carole Ely of Westlake Village brought along the Vector 1, a PC designed by Lore’s husband, Bob Harp. Interesting choice of headline.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
redm 5y ago
This was a fun read and a great story. I'm sure this will get downvoted since its not PC (pun intended), but I feel like the title should read "Two Bored 1970's Housewives, and an engineer Husband, Helped Create the PC Industry." 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't see how these can be separated, considering he was the Chief Engineer and created most of the products too. [2] [1] "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". [2] "Losing the engineer who had designed almost all of its hardware products since 1976 was a huge blow for Vector."
- srtjstjsj 5y ago
  Many people helped create the industry. This article focused on two of them.
  - meragrin_ 5y ago
    Bob looks to be a more important part of the story than Carole. He is certainly mentioned more often and his contributions are more clearly defined.
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      In those days, you could throw a rock in a random direction and hit a talented engineer. Still can, really. Management talent, not so much.
      - jhgb 5y ago
        The kind of management talent that declined to build IBM PC hardware at exactly the time when it could have given them massive competitive advantage over companies making a similar mistake?
franhield 5y ago
Great read; we can say that imagination is the limit for a skilled programmer—great idea combined with skill results in a good outcome.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
There are a lot more stories like this that would be great to unearth, rather than continuing to focus on the Jobs/Wozniak story. Much as I did love my ][!
leejoramo 5y ago
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. 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. Looking back, I wonder if the woman at the demo was Lore or Carole Vector was too expensive for my project. I did end up getting three Apple ][‘s for student use and a HeathKit CP/M system for the office. The school ended up being the first elementary school in the school district to give students access to computers.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Neat. About that time, maybe a year before a teacher of mine had a TRS-80 all-in-one in class. Decades ahead that one. Also in Ventura County. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#modeliii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#modeliii
johnx123-up 5y ago
FWIW... related article: The Rise and Decline of Vector Graphic : Management Mistakes and IBM Crush Couple’s Computer Venture (1985) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-20-fi-2173-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-20-fi-2173-s...
CyberRabbi 5y ago
“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. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic
- thoughtsimple 5y ago
  At the time PC was generic for personal computer. Only later was it associated with the IBM PC.
  - CyberRabbi 5y ago
    If anything that is the opposite of what is true. At the time IBM invented the term to market the IBM 5150. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
- ChickeNES 5y ago
  No: https://www.wired.com/2000/12/the-first-pc/ https://www.wired.com/2000/12/the-first-pc/
  - CyberRabbi 5y ago
    If you read the Wikipedia page for Vector Graphic, you’ll clearly see it states they produced microcomputers, not PCs. Contrast with IBM, Compaq.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
I find the headline to be promise more than it delivered. 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. His work created a hardware company called Vector Computers. His wife and another woman ran the business aspect of the company and the company did well. It did well thanks to the husband's identification of a huge market that offered a lot of opportunity. 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. 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 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. 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. 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.
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
  > 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 > 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. How do you look at the technical person putting it together and just disregard everything they are saying? When my non-technical persons bring forward a good idea or a good suggestion, we tend to weigh it versus previous ideas and market outlook...
  - soperj 5y ago
    >How do you look at the technical person putting it together and just disregard everything they are saying? Sounds like a large number of executives to me, honestly.
- 5y ago
AlbertCory 5y ago
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 not at Apple who were making fun, vital contributions to the PC industry, and I'm working on a post about another one that almost no one remembers (teaser). A Silicon Valley legend was Dennis Barnhart [1], who crashed the Ferrari that he'd bought with his IPO money for Eagle Computer (remember them? I thought not.) [1] https://https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/10/business/corporate-triumph-then-death-in-a-ferrari.html https://https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/10/business/corporat...
khazhoux 5y ago
> “We were bored doing the housewife thing,” recalls Ely today. “I was ready to be something.” I find it interesting how it'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. Since that's not likely to end anytime soon, I suppose it'd be funny to see the insults fly in the other direction. Like, stating how "working moms" are kidding themselves that they have a full mother-child relationship. They've out-sourced a critical and singular relationship to paid employees (the nanny -- assuming their spouse also works). They don't know what's going on in their kids' lives, they don't know who in school is bullying them, they don't know which kids are getting into drugs, they only know the very surface of what their kids are dealing with. They'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. None of the above is cool to say. But it's definitely OK to demean in the other direction. Disclaimer: I'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 "bored." And me, I know 100% there's an experience I've sadly forever missed of spending time with my kids, especially pre-WFH.
- balb0a 5y ago
  “We were bored doing the housewife thing,” recalls Ely today. “I was ready to be something.” Sounds like the approach Edward Bernays would take
  - khazhoux 5y ago
    I don't get the reference. Is Edward Bernays well-known?
    - balb0a 5y ago
      I would say very well known in the propaganda scene. You can check this "piano" article, I think it nicely shows the idea behind: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/edward-bernays-how-america-bought-piano-ben-paton https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/edward-bernays-how-america-bo...
dang 5y ago
A couple of past threads: How Two Bored 1970s Housewives Helped Create the PC Industry (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249920 - Jan 2018 (29 comments) How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9929333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9929333 - July 2015 (69 comments)
musicale 5y ago
> The only consumer PC company that survived into the 1990s with its own significant platform was Apple, and even then, just barely. Commodore was probably still "significant" in 1990. Acorn'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! On the hardware architecture side of course, ARM has simply taken over the world - including Apple.

233 points by edtechdev 5y ago

it sounds just like the plot to halt and catch fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...

wumms 5y ago
You're right: "In the first season of the TV series, Halt and Catch Fire, a fictional drama depicting the birth of the personal computer industry in the 1980s, the pivot of company Cardiff Electric resembles both the history of Corona Data Systems and Compaq." [0] (Corona Data Systems was co-founded by Robert Harp) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems
vimy 5y ago
I really hope Apple will make a folklore.org show in the style of Halt and Catch Fire.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  It's been done though with HCF, why would anyone but superfans want to see the same thing again?
  - Kye 5y ago
    It's not unusual for there to be many fictional treatments of the same history/source material.
    - apetresc 5y ago
      Sure, but when it's the fourth or fifth treatment about the relatively recent founding of a single company that is still dominant in the present day, and that treatment is sponsored by the company in question, it comes off as self-serving.
  - Zelphyr 5y ago
    I'd love to see a dramatization of the making of the Macintosh. I read Revolution In The Valley not too long ago and it's fascinating to read about the personalities of the people who created that machine. I think it would be a nice compliment to Halt and Catch Fire--a Mac version to their PC-Compatible show.
    - vimy 5y ago
      Exactly this. I would love to see the Japanese Sony engineer hiding in the closet from Steve Jobs.
- bitwize 5y ago
  I've been hoping for a Silicon Valley style dramedy series about the early days of open source. My headcasting for this has Donal Logue as Richard Stallman, Nick Offerman as Eric Raymond, and Cory Michael Smith as Linus.

nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago

> She found her talents wasting while her kids spent their days in class and her husband did the 9-to-5 at Hughes. Back then they did not know that moms are heroes and being a mom is a full-time job.

merliossu 5y ago
they still dont know. the narrative pushed by most of the woke people is that it is slavery and demeaning to raise your children and that women would rather make powerpoints for some random white dude paid 40-70k$/year than be enslaved to raising children
- mschuster91 5y ago
  The difference is payment of time in care work, and not just for childcare but also for other forms of care (disabled, elderly). Another very big issue is poverty. Time used for raising children doesn't count into pension payments, meaning that women who divorce from their husbands end up without anything in their name in the worst case.
  - monoideism 5y ago
    This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally found among the poor, just among middle class and up women (and men), typically left-leaning. Most poor mothers I've know would love to be stay-at-home moms because they're only working to survive and not for personal fulfillment, and because they love their kids.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Many middle class women and up also do housekeeping and care work. People are just different, and not everyone finds fulfillment in working outside the home. In fact with the pandemic making it so much easier to work while staying at home, some of these women might choose to find such work.
    - mschuster91 5y ago

shusaku 5y ago

> 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 Looking at their designs in the article, they just ooze cool.

thoughtsimple 5y ago
My favorite is the 8k static memory board. It has 64 RAM chips which means each one comes in at a whopping 128 bytes or 1k bits.

vegardx 5y ago

A colleague of mine got started programming because her fancy sewing machine was programmed using Cobol or Fortran. It'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. Now she's maintaining one of our mainframes at work. Extremely knowledgeable and kind. The kind of person you feel lucky to know.

bgmeister 5y ago
Norsk Data machines?
- unixhero 5y ago
  Current day mainframes in use in Norway would be IBM mainframes. Telenor, Nordea, DNB or Insurance companies...
codetrotter 5y ago
> sneak into classes All of the lectures at UiO are actually open to anyone as far as I know. You don’t need to be a student there or anything. You can just walk right in. And as long as you are quiet, and the room is not too full, I think it’s ok. But considering how inexpensive university education is in Norway, it may be an even better idea to sign up for classes because then you get to deliver assignments and get them graded and so on. Then again, when I attended university at UiO a lot of the intro classes were not inspiring. (And the same is probably true for most any university I think.) And I ended up not finishing my degree at UiO. So going to some lectures for the topics that you find the most interesting instead of enrolling as a student may not be such a bad idea either. One of the things I enjoyed the most about my time at UiO was this student union that was there. Lots of really skillful people were members of that student union and I learned quite a bit from some of them. I spent a lot of time in the location of that student union. In fact I can probably say, honestly, that I spent more time in that student union than I did in classes. Other members of that student union was also how I got to know about HN originally. This was over a decade ago now. It was a special place, and I am so happy that it existed and that I got to experience it. The building that we had our location in was eventually decommissioned and we got new location in a basement without windows. This killed the student union. No one wanted to hang out in a room deep down in a basement with no windows. And this new location was very inaccessible too, you had to walk through many corridors down in the basement to get to the room. Some of the people that had been doing the most for that student union started a new hacker space in Oslo. I’ve only been to the new hacker space a couple of times but it’s a pretty nice place too I think. The website of the student union continued to run on a server at UiO for several years after activity stopped, but the server went down a while back. I guess either the University Center for Information Technology (USIT) at UiO did a cleanup in the server rooms and found no one to speak to about the server, or they were informed that the student union was inactive, or the hardware in the server may have just malfunctioned after years of operation.

wumms 5y ago

> The following year, Bob founded Corona Data Systems [0], which created one of the first IBM PC clones. One of their ads is titled "The Apple vs. IBM debate is over. Meet the Winner." [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems [1] https://imgur.com/a/aDe5mkD https://imgur.com/a/aDe5mkD

ghaff 5y ago
One of those was the first PC I owned. The compatibility comment in the article was interesting. There was definitely a period when bug for bug PC compatibility was not widely appreciated by a lot of companies because it hadn't historically been a thing. Even Corona had a weird one-off monochrome graphics mode that basically no one supported (and made it incompatible with add-on graphics cards like Hercules). I think it's also easy for people to forget that in, say, 1982 if you were shopping for a computer a PC clone wasn't necessarily the obvious choice.

tromp 5y ago

> 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. How is that even possible? Two flights every day?

adventured 5y ago
Joe Biden did a three hour Amtrak trip (90 minutes each way) almost daily for 36 years for example. "Biden's apparently traveled over 2 million miles, the equivalent of four years of his life, on Amtrak." https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a32363173/joe-biden-amtrak-joe-meaning/ https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a32363173/joe-biden-amt...
- srtjstjsj 5y ago
  That's only a third of the 800 mile commute.
  - adventured 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you're getting at. The distance by itself isn't particularly meaningful, the speed traveled + distance is. Amtrak is quite slow. Jetliners are ~4-8x faster.
bityard 5y ago
Back then, there was no TSA screening process that took 1-2 hours of waiting in line, planes were smaller, airports were less busy, flights left on time whether they were full or not, and you could smoke on the plane. It would have been pretty expensive unless she or the company negotiated some kind of discount with the airline but lots of people today quite regularly commute 2 hours or more one-way in their car or on the train, so...
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  Oh my god I completely forgot about stuff like the NY - DC shuttle. You could show up at LGA, walk up to the counter and buy a ticket for a flight that ran once an hour and be in the air literally within minutes. The last time I remember it being that easy was probably 9/13/2001. An ex-girlfriend was trying to get to DC from MSP because her father worked in the Pentagon and she hadn't heard from him. She called me from the airport in a panic at 2AM asking for help because her credit card was declined. I drove to the airport, groggily handed the ticket agent my card and drove back home. She was probably on the plane before I got home. Then a few weeks later came all the TSA crap...

nikkinana 5y ago

Stick to porn

eloeffler 5y ago

Outrun by a bored college dropout and his friend

megamix 5y ago

I love housewives

amwelles 5y ago

Why can’t this headline say “two women?” Big yuck.

55555 5y ago
women = adult females bored 1970s housewives = bored adult females in the 1970s who have forgone a professional occupation to be a homemaker They used the latter because it's far more descriptive, and these facts are relevant to the article.
astura 5y ago
The title is literal, according to TFA the reason they started the company because they were bored with being housewives. >”I cannot stand being at home,” said Lore in a 1983 New York Times article. ”It drives me insane. Everybody thought I was strange because I would not go to the bridge club or have my fingernails done.” >Lore Harp met a kindred spirit in the form of a neighbor, Carole Ely, whose kids shared classes with the Harp children. Like Lore, she found the life of a homemaker wanting. “We were bored doing the housewife thing,” recalls Ely today. “I was ready to be something.” Just a few years prior, Ely had worked for large investment firms such as Merrill Lynch on the east coast, and she was itching to get back to business.
fghfghfghfghfgh 5y ago
Because the word "housewife" invokes a fuller mental image of what general boring conditions those two women might be living under?
Bigpet 5y ago
I too get offended when salient information to the story is part of the headline. I never want to read "Motorist kills 2 pedestrians", or "Policeofficer accused of planting evidence". It has to be "Person killed 2 other people" and "person accused of planting evidence" otherwise I am personally offended. Bigger yuck.
- cptnapalm 5y ago
  Anyone else remember when journalists were on some strange anti-SUV crusade. "SUV crashes into pedestrians", "SUV runs off bridge", "5 killed by SUV". The titles really read like SUVs had been co-opted by Skynet and were causing all sorts of mayhem.

heurisko 5y ago

Similar story in the UK, "Freelance Programmers" was created with the primary workforce of mothers with a technical background. The creator of the company, (now Dame) Stephanie Shirley, wrote about it in her memoirs "Let it Go", which I can recommend. 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.

severak_cz 5y ago

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], "vector graphics" is too generic search term. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EXN6j0TZv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EXN6j0TZv4

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago

> Lore Harp and Carole Ely of Westlake Village brought along the Vector 1, a PC designed by Lore’s husband, Bob Harp. Interesting choice of headline.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

redm 5y ago

This was a fun read and a great story. I'm sure this will get downvoted since its not PC (pun intended), but I feel like the title should read "Two Bored 1970's Housewives, and an engineer Husband, Helped Create the PC Industry." 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't see how these can be separated, considering he was the Chief Engineer and created most of the products too. [2] [1] "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". [2] "Losing the engineer who had designed almost all of its hardware products since 1976 was a huge blow for Vector."

srtjstjsj 5y ago
Many people helped create the industry. This article focused on two of them.
- meragrin_ 5y ago
  Bob looks to be a more important part of the story than Carole. He is certainly mentioned more often and his contributions are more clearly defined.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    In those days, you could throw a rock in a random direction and hit a talented engineer. Still can, really. Management talent, not so much.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      The kind of management talent that declined to build IBM PC hardware at exactly the time when it could have given them massive competitive advantage over companies making a similar mistake?

franhield 5y ago

Great read; we can say that imagination is the limit for a skilled programmer—great idea combined with skill results in a good outcome.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

There are a lot more stories like this that would be great to unearth, rather than continuing to focus on the Jobs/Wozniak story. Much as I did love my ][!

leejoramo 5y ago

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. 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. Looking back, I wonder if the woman at the demo was Lore or Carole Vector was too expensive for my project. I did end up getting three Apple ][‘s for student use and a HeathKit CP/M system for the office. The school ended up being the first elementary school in the school district to give students access to computers.

mixmastamyk 5y ago
Neat. About that time, maybe a year before a teacher of mine had a TRS-80 all-in-one in class. Decades ahead that one. Also in Ventura County. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#modeliii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#modeliii

johnx123-up 5y ago

FWIW... related article: The Rise and Decline of Vector Graphic : Management Mistakes and IBM Crush Couple’s Computer Venture (1985) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-20-fi-2173-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-20-fi-2173-s...

CyberRabbi 5y ago

“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. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic

thoughtsimple 5y ago
At the time PC was generic for personal computer. Only later was it associated with the IBM PC.
- CyberRabbi 5y ago
  If anything that is the opposite of what is true. At the time IBM invented the term to market the IBM 5150. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
ChickeNES 5y ago
No: https://www.wired.com/2000/12/the-first-pc/ https://www.wired.com/2000/12/the-first-pc/
- CyberRabbi 5y ago
  If you read the Wikipedia page for Vector Graphic, you’ll clearly see it states they produced microcomputers, not PCs. Contrast with IBM, Compaq.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

I find the headline to be promise more than it delivered. 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. His work created a hardware company called Vector Computers. His wife and another woman ran the business aspect of the company and the company did well. It did well thanks to the husband's identification of a huge market that offered a lot of opportunity. 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. 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 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. 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. 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.

WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
> 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 > 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. How do you look at the technical person putting it together and just disregard everything they are saying? When my non-technical persons bring forward a good idea or a good suggestion, we tend to weigh it versus previous ideas and market outlook...
- soperj 5y ago
  >How do you look at the technical person putting it together and just disregard everything they are saying? Sounds like a large number of executives to me, honestly.
5y ago

AlbertCory 5y ago

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 not at Apple who were making fun, vital contributions to the PC industry, and I'm working on a post about another one that almost no one remembers (teaser). A Silicon Valley legend was Dennis Barnhart [1], who crashed the Ferrari that he'd bought with his IPO money for Eagle Computer (remember them? I thought not.) [1] https://https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/10/business/corporate-triumph-then-death-in-a-ferrari.html https://https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/10/business/corporat...

khazhoux 5y ago

> “We were bored doing the housewife thing,” recalls Ely today. “I was ready to be something.” I find it interesting how it'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. Since that's not likely to end anytime soon, I suppose it'd be funny to see the insults fly in the other direction. Like, stating how "working moms" are kidding themselves that they have a full mother-child relationship. They've out-sourced a critical and singular relationship to paid employees (the nanny -- assuming their spouse also works). They don't know what's going on in their kids' lives, they don't know who in school is bullying them, they don't know which kids are getting into drugs, they only know the very surface of what their kids are dealing with. They'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. None of the above is cool to say. But it's definitely OK to demean in the other direction. Disclaimer: I'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 "bored." And me, I know 100% there's an experience I've sadly forever missed of spending time with my kids, especially pre-WFH.

balb0a 5y ago
“We were bored doing the housewife thing,” recalls Ely today. “I was ready to be something.” Sounds like the approach Edward Bernays would take
- khazhoux 5y ago
  I don't get the reference. Is Edward Bernays well-known?
  - balb0a 5y ago
    I would say very well known in the propaganda scene. You can check this "piano" article, I think it nicely shows the idea behind: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/edward-bernays-how-america-bought-piano-ben-paton https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/edward-bernays-how-america-bo...

dang 5y ago

A couple of past threads: How Two Bored 1970s Housewives Helped Create the PC Industry (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249920 - Jan 2018 (29 comments) How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9929333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9929333 - July 2015 (69 comments)

musicale 5y ago

> The only consumer PC company that survived into the 1990s with its own significant platform was Apple, and even then, just barely. Commodore was probably still "significant" in 1990. Acorn'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! On the hardware architecture side of course, ARM has simply taken over the world - including Apple.