This can be read as a story of what happens when management becomes divorced from engineering... literally.
>Lore Harp and Carole Ely of Westlake Village brought along the Vector 1, a PC designed by Lore's husband, Bob Harp.
>In 1980, the partnership began to crack at the seams. The stresses of the company took a heavy toll on Bob and Lore's marriage, prompting them to seek a divorce.
>Bob fought with Vector's board of directors, insisting the company should sell an IBM PC compatible machine, but Lore and the board resisted. [...] "I felt that I had to leave the company and start another one based on PC compatibles," says Bob. Vector's board granted his wish, firing him in 1981. The following year, Bob founded Corona Data Systems, which created one of the first IBM PC clones.
>Lore became the first female founder to take her company public on the New York Stock Exchange. But the celebration was short-lived. IBM PC's jump into the personal computer market in August of that year had a clarifying effect on the industry.
>In 1982, Lore married tech media magnate Patrick McGovern, the founder of research firm IDC and publisher of Computerworld and InfoWorld [...] She sought a new beginning with more time devoted to her marriage. [...] Between the grueling daily commute and a lack of love from the board of directors, Lore had had enough. She stepped down once again, this time for good. It was 1984; she was 40 years old.
>The company filed for bankruptcy in 1985, ceased operations in 1986, and a holding company liquidated all its assets [...] in 1987
I think it reads more as a story of what happens when there are factors outside of your control while running your company. They could do nothing about the IBM PC and they even knew that IBM was mimicing their business strategy, and yet there was nothing they could do. IBM couldn't work with them because they couldn't handle the volume.
They knew their end was coming and they all exited the company when they saw what was coming. I think they showed themselves to be much more savvy then you give them credit for.
Today, it would be like you finding out that Google is about to come to compete with you.
They did great, I think. They did an IPO, cashed out, stuck the investors with the shitty stock, gave all of their employees significant stock grants, and went on to live nice lives. That's everyone's HN dream.
"The firm ultimately shared its fate with the every other PC maker that didn't jump on the IBM clone bandwagon. The only consumer PC company that survived into the 1990s with its own significant platform was Apple, and even then, just barely."
What made Apple SO different from all the others that failed?
Might sound odd or just plain weird, but Apple targeted the mainstream and education for name recognition. In fact, a lot of people still believe Apple invented the PC when their claim to fame was building something for the non-hobbyist / professional. This mindshare carried them through some horrific management in the 80's and 90's.
I do agree with minthd that having their own OS was a factor, but Commodore could have claimed that also along with having a much more advanced machine than Apple.
[edit]here is the ad https://www.pinterest.com/pin/406942516299771530/ [NSFW pictures greyed out around it] I do believe there was a really hokey Ben Franklin version also - to give some context that where Atari was advertising
Apple was #1 in personal computing before the IBM PC crushed the Apple II. Apple dropped below 10% market share during the PC era. It took a long time for the Macintosh to get any traction, partly because Apple was years late coming out with a good hard disk machine. (1983: IBM XT, 10MB internal hard drive standard. 1987: Macintosh SE, 20MB internal hard drive optional.) By the time Apple had caught up, the IBM PC was entrenched as the standard.
I think it boils down to: Apple established a platform and ecosystem for consumers, education, and business. The S100 companies largely sold CP/M boxes for business use. When PC clones turned "business" computers into a commodity, there was still a reason to buy Apples.
Not much, really. I would even dispute the premise: the Commodore Amiga was still a viable platform up through the mid-'90s, for instance, and Atari's ST was still around and kicking then too.
Apple had a strong foothold in education with the Apple II, and the Macintosh had better graphics capabilities than stock PCs into the 90s giving Apple a strong presence in the design industry.
Momentum and brand, and a band of loyal enthusiasts to carry the flag through the dark years.
There was also an insistence on quality for a long time, and to be something else other than a business computer.
It's really a miracle they survived. It was very close. I can remember a time when we would laugh at people for persisting with an Apple. In those days there was hardly any software available, and career-wise, it looked like the deadest of dead ends.
The first time I remember this changing was circa 2003 when a friend confided he'd bought an Apple and was attempting to re-learn how to use it. It sounded odd at the time (he previously had been a linux installer) and I distinctly remember it because it was the earliest indicator of a change in the wind.
> What made Apple SO different from all the others that failed?
Others have given decent answers, but, honestly, I don't think Apple was all that different. As you noted, "... even then, just barely."
We tend to think of Apple rather differently, today. But remember that Apple wasn't really such a big deal 20 years ago. The Apple that just barely made it through the 1980s and the Apple that reworked NeXTSTEP into OS X, brought out the iPhone, etc., are rather different beasts. They share a name and some corporate infrastructure, but not a lot else, really.
They were entrenched in a few niche markets: Education, Music Production, Desktop Publishing. Photoshop, Pagemaker, ProTools were all Mac first, so that's where the users were and they were locked in due to files, plugins, fonts etc.
To be fair Commodore and Atari were still making their own computers (Amiga/ST) in the early nineties. More accurate would be "consumer PC company that survived into the 1995s"
Or better: "How 2 wives created Silicon Valley". Rewind the clock to that morning in 1938 when Bill Hewlett started working with David Packard in the garage at the house where Packard lived. They worked there for 1 year. They made no money for 1 year. Meanwhile, Mrs Packard went out to work, and later Mrs Hewlett went out to work. And for several decades afterwards, this was how many early stage startups in the Valley were financed: finance-via-wife.
Pretty awesome story. All articles I've seen on women in tech talk of Fiorina, Mayer, etc. Yet, these women were awesome, their influence great, and I've never heard of them. Should probably get cited more often in discussions on either women in tech or historical accounts of entrepreneurs making it big on a budget.
An example on the technical side would be Margaret Hamilton: the woman who pretty much invented [1] software engineering (and coined the term) during Apollo project. The first CASE tool for it, too, IIRC. The reliability and integration capabilities of their production code exceeded [2] anything I see in Agile, etc. Yet, I didn't see her name in any mainstream article on the subject and only knew about her due to a casual mention by a friend while discussing high assurance systems. Seemed to be better known in research sector per Wikipedia [3].
So, next time Mr. Nadella at Microsoft wants to rag on women in tech, we can remind him of two whose management talent he still hasn't beat and one that his engineers lag behind in production code despite not being limited to 60's era tech. ;)
(See more of how they started rather than USL itself. Talk about straight up hitting all the problems head-on, at once, and attempting once-and-for-all.)
My Dad had a Vector in the 80s - learned a lot from it. It had a big reset button on the front, which instantly booted into the "monitor" - a program which let you inspect and disassemble RAM. (RAM was not erased in the reboot.)
You could, of course use the monitor to disassemble the monitor, which was a good way to learn assembly language.
Later I wired an Atari joystick to the machine - it had some kind of GPIO pins. It was a very hackable platform, with S100 slots, tons of space inside, and lots of DSUB cutouts on the rear panel.
Wrote several video games in Z80 for that machine, although graphics were limited to TRS-80 style 6-pixels-per-character.
Later I found out that Disney Imagineering built a loudspeaker monitoring multiplexer around a similar S100 computer. It allowed a sound technician to remotely choose an amp output to monitor. I wonder how many other cool applications these machines enabled.
1. The show's story and characterization is innovative because it intentionally is about people who lived in a historical period, not people who shaped it. Joe and Gordon are not Jobs and Wozniak. Jobs and Woz are Jobs and Woz, and in the long run the Macintosh eats the Giant's lunch. So it's cool to see ambitious people try to reach for the stars, even if they're fated to fail.
2. The show does a good job not being solely about the drama or about the technology and history thereof, but of being an acceptable blend of the two. Certainly the tech details are sometimes inaccurate, and the history skewed (the characters keep coming up with ideas for which there already were contemporaries). And the drama is often contrived, and in the first season, often not very good. But somehow when then come together the weaknesses manage to get overshadowed by the strengths. A good hack of a prestige drama.
You won't need to imagine that, you can look around you and see it every day, we're heading there pretty rapidly only via a slightly different path than the one that you are suggesting.
>Bob designed other boards for S-100 bus machines, including a PROM board that eliminated the need for hobbyists to manually enter a boot-up program sequence via front panel switches
Does it mean Bob Harp invented the BIOS?
Wikipedia has the term BIOS being used in the way we expect by CP/M in 1975, the article has Vector starting in 1976 and the PROM board created after their memory board saw success.
It sounds like he brought the BIOS to S-100 bus machines though.
Me too. I have a real fascination for this Cambrian period of computing, even though I came into it via the strange world of home computers (Sinclair). By the time I got my hands on business computers, Wintel had won.
I saved an S-100 machine from the skip when I was at school, made by SWTPC. It ran Uniflex, a version of the Flex operating system which was designed for multiple users, based on some Unix ideas.
It worked briefly when I got it but then stopped, and I could never figure out why. In the end, I donated it to this guy http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/fixed_pages/swtp.html who I found via the wonderful alt.folklore.computers newsgroup.
There are tons of fascinating companies like this. Personally I like Connectix. Almost nobody (other than early hardcore Apple users) knows about Connectix, but start listing their products and :o
tangential: the cover (http://b.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline/...) with the Altair - the spark of one tech revolution - also contains the "CCD's - TV Camera Tube Successor?". It is like the editors were able to somehow feel heartbeat pulse of the future ...
[+] [-] zeteo|10 years ago|reply
>Lore Harp and Carole Ely of Westlake Village brought along the Vector 1, a PC designed by Lore's husband, Bob Harp.
>In 1980, the partnership began to crack at the seams. The stresses of the company took a heavy toll on Bob and Lore's marriage, prompting them to seek a divorce.
>Bob fought with Vector's board of directors, insisting the company should sell an IBM PC compatible machine, but Lore and the board resisted. [...] "I felt that I had to leave the company and start another one based on PC compatibles," says Bob. Vector's board granted his wish, firing him in 1981. The following year, Bob founded Corona Data Systems, which created one of the first IBM PC clones.
>Lore became the first female founder to take her company public on the New York Stock Exchange. But the celebration was short-lived. IBM PC's jump into the personal computer market in August of that year had a clarifying effect on the industry.
>In 1982, Lore married tech media magnate Patrick McGovern, the founder of research firm IDC and publisher of Computerworld and InfoWorld [...] She sought a new beginning with more time devoted to her marriage. [...] Between the grueling daily commute and a lack of love from the board of directors, Lore had had enough. She stepped down once again, this time for good. It was 1984; she was 40 years old.
>The company filed for bankruptcy in 1985, ceased operations in 1986, and a holding company liquidated all its assets [...] in 1987
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comrade1|10 years ago|reply
They knew their end was coming and they all exited the company when they saw what was coming. I think they showed themselves to be much more savvy then you give them credit for.
Today, it would be like you finding out that Google is about to come to compete with you.
They did great, I think. They did an IPO, cashed out, stuck the investors with the shitty stock, gave all of their employees significant stock grants, and went on to live nice lives. That's everyone's HN dream.
[+] [-] Zikes|10 years ago|reply
What would you call that, Flash Of Actual Content?
[+] [-] spikej|10 years ago|reply
What made Apple SO different from all the others that failed?
[+] [-] protomyth|10 years ago|reply
Might sound odd or just plain weird, but Apple targeted the mainstream and education for name recognition. In fact, a lot of people still believe Apple invented the PC when their claim to fame was building something for the non-hobbyist / professional. This mindshare carried them through some horrific management in the 80's and 90's.
I do agree with minthd that having their own OS was a factor, but Commodore could have claimed that also along with having a much more advanced machine than Apple.
[edit]here is the ad https://www.pinterest.com/pin/406942516299771530/ [NSFW pictures greyed out around it] I do believe there was a really hokey Ben Franklin version also - to give some context that where Atari was advertising
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] setpatchaddress|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smacktoward|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarrel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brc|10 years ago|reply
There was also an insistence on quality for a long time, and to be something else other than a business computer.
It's really a miracle they survived. It was very close. I can remember a time when we would laugh at people for persisting with an Apple. In those days there was hardly any software available, and career-wise, it looked like the deadest of dead ends.
The first time I remember this changing was circa 2003 when a friend confided he'd bought an Apple and was attempting to re-learn how to use it. It sounded odd at the time (he previously had been a linux installer) and I distinctly remember it because it was the earliest indicator of a change in the wind.
[+] [-] ggchappell|10 years ago|reply
Others have given decent answers, but, honestly, I don't think Apple was all that different. As you noted, "... even then, just barely."
We tend to think of Apple rather differently, today. But remember that Apple wasn't really such a big deal 20 years ago. The Apple that just barely made it through the 1980s and the Apple that reworked NeXTSTEP into OS X, brought out the iPhone, etc., are rather different beasts. They share a name and some corporate infrastructure, but not a lot else, really.
[+] [-] yasth|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minthd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FigBug|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaysonL|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pekk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cms07|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz_pl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkrubner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
An example on the technical side would be Margaret Hamilton: the woman who pretty much invented [1] software engineering (and coined the term) during Apollo project. The first CASE tool for it, too, IIRC. The reliability and integration capabilities of their production code exceeded [2] anything I see in Agile, etc. Yet, I didn't see her name in any mainstream article on the subject and only knew about her due to a casual mention by a friend while discussing high assurance systems. Seemed to be better known in research sector per Wikipedia [3].
So, next time Mr. Nadella at Microsoft wants to rag on women in tech, we can remind him of two whose management talent he still hasn't beat and one that his engineers lag behind in production code despite not being limited to 60's era tech. ;)
[1] http://htius.com/Articles/r12ham.pdf
(See more of how they started rather than USL itself. Talk about straight up hitting all the problems head-on, at once, and attempting once-and-for-all.)
[2] http://www.htius.com/News_Links/251093main_The_NASA_Heritage...
(see page 13 for specific principles she derived)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist...
[+] [-] jamespitts|10 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWrioRji60A
[+] [-] rasz_pl|10 years ago|reply
They say things like "Atari 420ST" on that show.
[+] [-] asher|10 years ago|reply
You could, of course use the monitor to disassemble the monitor, which was a good way to learn assembly language.
Later I wired an Atari joystick to the machine - it had some kind of GPIO pins. It was a very hackable platform, with S100 slots, tons of space inside, and lots of DSUB cutouts on the rear panel.
Wrote several video games in Z80 for that machine, although graphics were limited to TRS-80 style 6-pixels-per-character.
Later I found out that Disney Imagineering built a loudspeaker monitoring multiplexer around a similar S100 computer. It allowed a sound technician to remotely choose an amp output to monitor. I wonder how many other cool applications these machines enabled.
[+] [-] j_s|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|10 years ago|reply
1. The show's story and characterization is innovative because it intentionally is about people who lived in a historical period, not people who shaped it. Joe and Gordon are not Jobs and Wozniak. Jobs and Woz are Jobs and Woz, and in the long run the Macintosh eats the Giant's lunch. So it's cool to see ambitious people try to reach for the stars, even if they're fated to fail.
2. The show does a good job not being solely about the drama or about the technology and history thereof, but of being an acceptable blend of the two. Certainly the tech details are sometimes inaccurate, and the history skewed (the characters keep coming up with ideas for which there already were contemporaries). And the drama is often contrived, and in the first season, often not very good. But somehow when then come together the weaknesses manage to get overshadowed by the strengths. A good hack of a prestige drama.
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
Or if they started an app store.
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nano2rad|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhurron|10 years ago|reply
It sounds like he brought the BIOS to S-100 bus machines though.
[+] [-] mark-r|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VSpike|10 years ago|reply
I saved an S-100 machine from the skip when I was at school, made by SWTPC. It ran Uniflex, a version of the Flex operating system which was designed for multiple users, based on some Unix ideas.
It worked briefly when I got it but then stopped, and I could never figure out why. In the end, I donated it to this guy http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/fixed_pages/swtp.html who I found via the wonderful alt.folklore.computers newsgroup.
[+] [-] rasz_pl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhway|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leroy_masochist|10 years ago|reply