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Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home
- KingOfCoders 3y agoAlso see “Steve" Shirley, she build a company of coders, women only [0], from the '60s on with remote first :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley [0] She hired all the female IBM coders who couldn't make a career at IBM
- buovjaga 3y agoRecent discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39585527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39585527
- rsynnott 3y agoWait, how did remote first work in the 60s? Did they post in punchcards? TTYs weren't really much of a thing at that stage, were they?
- dws 3y agoCoding forms, accumulated until someone had access to a keypunch. Turnaround time could be days, which encouraged being very scrupulous when coding.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoI 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.
- 5555624 3y agoWrite 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.
- beachy 3y agoWe 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.
- Stratoscope 3y agoI 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter 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." So I did, and they did!
- xyst 3y agoBack when the word of your boss or manager actually meant something. Today, have to get that in writing otherwise risk getting hung out to dry in court or worse.
- zer00eyz 3y agoNo, 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.
- sriram_sun 3y agoI guess everything was "remote". My dad had to mail his code (punch cards) from (IIT) Madras to (IISc) Bangalore. He did say it was a pain though. * IISc - Indian Institute of Science * Madras, now Chennai was probably an overnight drive in the late 60s.
- xyst 3y agoI tried finding a source on the work environment at the time. But nothing describing the work setup. Might be hidden in some biography though. Speculation: maybe they mailed in their punch cards to main office. Or called it in over the phone.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoI 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. https://www.manager-magazin.de/hbm/eine-firma-ohne-bueros-a-de8f9303-0002-0001-0000-000029861758 https://www.manager-magazin.de/hbm/eine-firma-ohne-bueros-a-...
- blacklion 3y agoUntil Act which (supposedly) was approved to help fight sexism stops this "women only".
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- dang 3y agoRelated: A woman named "Steve" – IT pioneer, entrepreneur, philanthropist (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39585527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39585527 - March 2024 (123 comments) All-female distributed-team software startup goes big in 1962 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6861666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6861666 - Dec 2013 (0 comments, but worth reading the article) A Woman's Place - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5692271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5692271 - May 2013 (1 comment)
- garius 3y agoRest assured Steve is very much on my long-list! 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.
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- gary_0 3y agoThis 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.
- josephd79 3y agoIt’s a great show.
- flockonus 3y agoI 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.
- delichon 3y agoThis 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.
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- nashashmi 3y agoI thought Lore looked like the actress in the show
- flockonus 3y agoHoping for an upcoming movie in the vein of BlackBerry (2023)
- lotsofpulp 3y agoIn case you didn't know, that movie was a lot of fiction. https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/blackberry/ https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/blackberry/ 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.
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- benjedwards 3y agoIf you enjoyed this, back in 2015 I wrote a feature about Lore Harp McGovern and her business partners for Fast Company that goes into the creation of Vector Graphic in detail: https://www.fastcompany.com/3047428/how-two-bored-1970s-housewives-helped-create-the-pc-industry https://www.fastcompany.com/3047428/how-two-bored-1970s-hous...
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoI knew this was familiar but I couldn't remember where I had read it before :-)
- garius 3y agoReading that back in the day was one of the reasons she was on my list for this series to write about. Was the first time I'd heard of her! (Love your ongoing blog and output)
- le-mark 3y agoThat 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.
- zitterbewegung 3y agoInterestingly 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. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic
- garius 3y agoYeah - 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.
- Atreiden 3y ago[flagged]
- masswerk 3y agoTo 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.
- yardie 3y agoI 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.
- masswerk 3y agoOn 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.)
- blashyrk 3y ago> 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.
- valley_guy_12 3y agoI 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.
- buescher 3y agoYeah, 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.
- thimkerbell 3y agoWhere is Lore Harp McGovern on Twitter?
- pxeger1 3y agoShe’s 80, so probably nowhere.
- ugur2nd 3y agoIt's a fascinating story. I feel that most things are possible when I see stories like this.
- laurex 3y agoIt’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.
- garius 3y agoSomething 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.
- TMWNN 3y agoThanks 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.
- ThomPete 3y agothere 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
- worik 3y ago> tech industry is on of the most inclusive industries because it... Where have you been? That ignoring history
- DontchaKnowit 3y ago[flagged]
- caycep 3y agoCarol Ely eventually took over the CEO job at Sun from Scott McNally, I think?
- toolz 3y agoI 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.
- leononame 3y agoHow 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.
- toolz 3y agowell 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.
- leononame 3y agoIf 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.
- nimfan 3y ago"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! ;-)
- mkesper 3y agoThe CPU was a Z80, that must have been RAM. http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/Vector%20Graphic/VG%208K%20SRAM/VG%208K%20SRAM.htm http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/Vector%20Grap...
- buescher 3y agoNo, it looks more like a misunderstanding. The Vector 3 was an 8-bit machine with 64K of RAM. https://web.archive.org/web/20110925031455/http://www.vectorgraphics.org.uk/page6.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110925031455/http://www.vector... 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.
- garius 3y agoYup. 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. I'll flag it.
- grujicd 3y agoIt was a clear sign that author doesn't know a difference between 8-bit CPU and 8K of RAM and what kind of transition was happening at the time.
- shortformblog 3y agoI 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.
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- syngrog66 3y agoI've never heard of that microcomputer "empire" before and yet I know of lots of other computer businesses from its supposed era.
- worik 3y agoBackwards in high heels, indeed 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"?
- lr1970 3y ago> 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. [0] 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...
- Solvency 3y agoIsn'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?
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- tdeck 3y agoIn case anyone wondered, here you can see the manual for one of their machines' video cards (I am not sure where it fits in their range). http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Manuals/Vector%20Graphic/Vector%20Graphic%20High%20Resolution%20Graphics%20Board%20(Rev.%201-D).pdf http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Manuals/Vector%20Gra... Sadly both the display technology and the graphics memory are raster. I was hoping it would be something like the Vectrex or the Imlac.
- HocusLocus 3y agoMy 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!
- kragen 3y agoarticle says > With her friend Carole Ely, she grew their company, Vector Graphic, into a major manufacturer of microcomputers wikipedia says > Vector Graphic sales peaked in 1982, by which time the company was publicly traded, at $36 million. It faltered soon after... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic 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 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')
- mycologos 3y ago"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. [1] https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/april/apple-computer-founded https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/april/... [2] http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/Vector%20Graphic/History/VG%20History.htm http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/Vector%20Grap...
- kragen 3y agoi'm not sure it would be accurate to describe apple as a major microcomputer manufacturer in 01978
- PlunderBunny 3y agoIt'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.
- buescher 3y agoIt's almost as if Apple went under in 1982 and all Steve Jobs ever did after that was remarry well.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago... and yet you've heard of Adam Osborne.
- buescher 3y agoDoes he have a building at MIT named after him?
- musicale 3y agoHow about a namesake effect? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect (Note Steve Jobs used the Osborne effect to promote the Mac at the expense of Apple's own Lisa.)
- EchoReflection 3y agothe 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]
- ejona86 3y ago> ... 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. 1. https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=29115 https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=29115 2. https://groups.google.com/g/s100computers/c/Q8BUj8xHp5E/ https://groups.google.com/g/s100computers/c/Q8BUj8xHp5E/ (my post)
- garius 3y agoYou have a 4?! I'm jealous! Yeah, I think like everything their issue (with hindsight) was mostly that they needed to be faster on the changes across the board to survive. I don't really blame them for missing that window. It was so small to begin with thanks to IBM. I'll be covering IBM and Don Estridge next.