return to table of content

Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

Atreiden
26 replies
1d2h

I think this paragraph says it all, really:

Although the IPO would represent a major achievement for both Harp and Ely, running Vector was taking a toll on their marriages. Ely’s husband had tolerated her role at Vector as an outlet for her boredom, but as she continued to invest more of her time in the company, their relationship began to deteriorate. For the Harps, cracks were also appearing. Bob had also initially seen Vector as a side project for Lore Harp, and his direct involvement created further problems when the two began to hold different opinions on how the company should be run. He was resentful of the level of attention she received in the press, feeling it diminished his own role at Vector.

Their own husbands were resentful of their success. Despite being direct beneficiaries of it. Their egos literally could not take their wives overshadowing their own accomplishments. One can easily imagine how other men in power felt about their presence in the industry.

When it comes to Steve Jobs, people sing his praises as a visionary and leader - someone who entirely changed the game, even though he was non-technical. His wikipedia page is 23,000 words, and is available in 161 languages.

But a woman comes along in the same time period, building a company from nothing at the frontier of the very same industry, while offering unheard-of benefits and compensation for her employees, and she is cast as a villain ("Ice Queen") and relegated to a footnote in history. Her wikipedia page is a single paragraph that mostly mentions her relationship to her second husband. Her company, and it's legacy, ultimately destroyed by the men who overrode her decisions and opted to take the 'safer' route.

A portrait of the insidious nature of sexism.

nashashmi
6 replies
1d1h

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.

nashashmi
5 replies
23h57m

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.

flkiwi
1 replies
23h25m

What?

nashashmi
0 replies
20h52m

Nothing

cgh
1 replies
19h51m

Consider spending less time online.

nashashmi
0 replies
18h5m

I don’t think that’s relevant here.

nashashmi
0 replies
4h45m

To the people who keep downvoting this, you should explain why.

blashyrk
4 replies
1d1h

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.

Atreiden
3 replies
1d1h

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.

blashyrk
2 replies
1d1h

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?

Atreiden
1 replies
1d

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.

spopejoy
0 replies
1h59m

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.

shrubble
2 replies
16h48m

She married a multi-billionaire, who she was in a relationship of some kind with, before she was ever divorced. Did you notice that in the article?

BTW Bob Harp went on to found Corona Data Systems also.

lr1970
1 replies
10h3m

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.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-20-fi-2173-s...

buescher
0 replies
8h5m

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.

masswerk
2 replies
1d2h

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.

yardie
1 replies
1d

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.

masswerk
0 replies
1d

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.)

jbellis
1 replies
1d1h

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.

masswerk
0 replies
3h44m

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.)

chasd00
1 replies
1d

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.

spopejoy
0 replies
1h53m

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.

randomdata
0 replies
17h42m

> 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.

devsda
0 replies
1d1h

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.

barrysteve
0 replies
14h56m

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?

1234letshaveatw
0 replies
1d

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?

KingOfCoders
22 replies
1d4h

Also 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

[0] She hired all the female IBM coders who couldn't make a career at IBM

rsynnott
17 replies
1d4h

Wait, 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?

Stratoscope
9 replies
1d3h

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare

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
5 replies
1d3h

Back 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
4 replies
1d3h

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.

flkiwi
2 replies
23h34m

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.

zer00eyz
1 replies
18h27m

This is true.

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.

flkiwi
0 replies
40m

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.

tmpz22
0 replies
1d2h

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.

tim333
1 replies
1d2h

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

anotheruser13
0 replies
21h2m

Even further than that. In 1978, we used a TI Silent 700 terminal connected to a PDP-11 so we could learn BASIC.

xenospn
0 replies
1d2h

What a great story! Hats off to your manager.

xyst
1 replies
1d3h

I 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.

dws
1 replies
1d3h

Coding forms, accumulated until someone had access to a keypunch.

Turnaround time could be days, which encouraged being very scrupulous when coding.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
0 replies
1d2h

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.

5555624
1 replies
1d3h

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.

abraae
0 replies
1d2h

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.

sriram_sun
0 replies
1d3h

I 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.

garius
0 replies
1d2h

Rest 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.

blacklion
0 replies
1d3h

Until Act which (supposedly) was approved to help fight sexism stops this "women only".

toolz
18 replies
1d1h

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.

leononame
12 replies
1d1h

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.

toolz
4 replies
1d

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.

leononame
3 replies
23h49m

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.

trimethylpurine
2 replies
14h17m

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.

And do the same for your sons.

WarOnPrivacy
0 replies
7h41m

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.

AlecSchueler
0 replies
12h44m

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.

ekms
3 replies
1d

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

leononame
0 replies
23h53m

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.

bobthepanda
0 replies
22h14m

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?

WarOnPrivacy
0 replies
7h55m

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).

rootusrootus
2 replies
1d

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.

randomdata
0 replies
18h15m

> 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.

AlecSchueler
0 replies
12h42m

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.

IncreasePosts
1 replies
20h32m

You need to look at dropout rate...what if women are 50% of freshmen CS majors and only 20% of graduates?

petesergeant
0 replies
16h1m

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.

laurex
0 replies
1d

Perhaps rather than simply looking at numbers for SWEs, we might also look at numbers for CEOs of successful companies?

dosinga
0 replies
23h6m

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

AlecSchueler
0 replies
12h54m

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.

laurex
11 replies
1d1h

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.

ThomPete
8 replies
1d1h

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

0xEF
2 replies
11h56m

ITT: likely male HN users weighing in on how difficult or not difficult it is to be a woman in the tech industry.

I'd love to hear thoughts on this take about just how inclusive the tech industry from women, or LGBTA or BiPoC individuals.

saagarjha
0 replies
8h44m

Unfortunately Hacker News might not be the best place to solicit that opinion, given the demographics of its users…

rubylark
0 replies
5h42m

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".

(PSA: "you guys" is gender neutral)

worik
0 replies
1d1h

tech industry is on of the most inclusive industries because it...

Where have you been?

That ignoring history

vidarh
0 replies
4h30m

It might well be true that it is "one of the most inclusive", but that does not mean it doesn't also have an extensive history of discrimination.

cgh
0 replies
19h58m

Not in the 1970s, which was when these events took place.

barrenko
0 replies
1d

No industry is inclusive, nor will ever be, that is almost by definition.

AlecSchueler
0 replies
12h40m

The tech industry is on of the most inclusive industries

The irony being that by saying this you're literally dismissing the voices and lived experiences of many many women in tech who would say otherwise.

garius
1 replies
1d1h

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.

TMWNN
0 replies
22h58m

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.

nimfan
4 replies
1d

"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! ;-)

buescher
1 replies
7h5m

No, 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.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
0 replies
4h32m

Yup.

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
0 replies
8h5m

It 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.

gary_0
4 replies
1d4h

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.

nashashmi
0 replies
1d1h

I thought Lore looked like the actress in the show

josephd79
0 replies
1d3h

It’s a great show.

flockonus
0 replies
1d3h

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.

delichon
0 replies
1d3h

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.

kragen
3 replies
18h42m

article 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

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')

mycologos
1 replies
17h48m

"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/...

[2] http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/Vector%20Grap...

kragen
0 replies
17h27m

i'm not sure it would be accurate to describe apple as a major microcomputer manufacturer in 01978

buescher
0 replies
6h48m

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.
le-mark
0 replies
20h53m

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.

garius
0 replies
1d2h

Reading 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)

HeyLaughingBoy
0 replies
1d2h

I knew this was familiar but I couldn't remember where I had read it before :-)

PlunderBunny
3 replies
17h26m

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.

buescher
2 replies
8h3m

It's almost as if Apple went under in 1982 and all Steve Jobs ever did after that was remarry well.

NovemberWhiskey
1 replies
6h33m

... and yet you've heard of Adam Osborne.

buescher
0 replies
5h58m

Does he have a building at MIT named after him?

zitterbewegung
1 replies
1d2h

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.

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

garius
0 replies
1d2h

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.

worik
1 replies
21h46m

Backwards 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
0 replies
9h55m

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-s...

valley_guy_12
1 replies
1d2h

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.

buescher
0 replies
6h6m

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.

thimkerbell
1 replies
1d1h

Where is Lore Harp McGovern on Twitter?

pxeger1
0 replies
1d1h

She’s 80, so probably nowhere.

flockonus
1 replies
1d3h

Hoping for an upcoming movie in the vein of BlackBerry (2023)

lotsofpulp
0 replies
1d2h

In case you didn't know, that movie was a lot of fiction.

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.

ejona86
1 replies
6h25m

... 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 2. https://groups.google.com/g/s100computers/c/Q8BUj8xHp5E/ (my post)

garius
0 replies
4h35m

You 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.

ugur2nd
0 replies
1d1h

It's a fascinating story. I feel that most things are possible when I see stories like this.

tdeck
0 replies
18h46m

In 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%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.

syngrog66
0 replies
21h54m

I've never heard of that microcomputer "empire" before and yet I know of lots of other computer businesses from its supposed era.

shortformblog
0 replies
1d

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.

caycep
0 replies
1d1h

Carol Ely eventually took over the CEO job at Sun from Scott McNally, I think?

Solvency
0 replies
21h40m

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?