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.
> ... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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')
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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! ;-)
My 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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
[+] [-] PlunderBunny|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] buescher|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ejona86|1 year ago|reply
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|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shortformblog|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] valley_guy_12|1 year ago|reply
In that era Apple had an enormous lead in graphics, software, and peripheral cards.
[+] [-] buescher|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] laurex|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] garius|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ThomPete|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] benjedwards|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] garius|1 year ago|reply
(Love your ongoing blog and output)
[+] [-] le-mark|1 year ago|reply
I’d love to read more about these products and their history. It was all very opaque. Even back then.
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|1 year ago|reply
> 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 year ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] buescher|1 year ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|1 year ago|reply
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic
[+] [-] garius|1 year ago|reply
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.
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[+] [-] tdeck|1 year ago|reply
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|1 year ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|1 year ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley
[0] She hired all the female IBM coders who couldn't make a career at IBM
[+] [-] dang|1 year ago|reply
A woman named "Steve" – IT pioneer, entrepreneur, philanthropist (2019) - 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 - Dec 2013 (0 comments, but worth reading the article)
A Woman's Place - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5692271 - May 2013 (1 comment)
[+] [-] rsynnott|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] lotsofpulp|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] leononame|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dosinga|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AlecSchueler|1 year ago|reply
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|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] IncreasePosts|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thimkerbell|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pxeger1|1 year ago|reply