How Two Bored 1970s Housewives Helped Create the PC Industry 191
harrymcc writes: One of the first significant PC companies was Vector Graphic. Founded in 1976, it was an innovator in everything from industrial design to sales and marketing, and eventually went public. And alone among early PC makers, it was founded and run by two women, Lore Harp and Carole Ely. Over at Fast Company, Benj Edwards tells the story of this fascinating, forgotten company.
Bored Housewives (Score:5, Funny)
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I started reading the article, because I usually know how these bored housewife stories on the internet go. Imagine my shock when I got to the end and it was still talking business. Even the man with the porn stache called Adam Osborne didn't lead to anything.
Man could ROCK a velour jacket, though :-)
Yeah, good on them for not knowing that starting their own business was something only guys could do.
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Captain Zapp Brannigan: You know, boys, a good captain needs abilities like boldness, daring and a good velour uniform[...]
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It sounds like a somewhat familiar story to most people in tech: the engineers put out decent work and have a decent idea of what's possible and necessary, but are increasingly sidelined by a management that's far too egotistical to believe anyone else might know more than they do, and far too fawned upon to realize that.
Not really. His idea was basically to clone the IBM PC and compete with them; it wasn't some brilliant engineering feat but rather a guess at what it takes to survive. Quite a few vendors tried just that strategy and wound up bankrupt despite their efforts. A number of them ran MS-DOS but just because ether ran that didn't mean a program that would run on an IBM PC would run on the clone unless it was designed to run on the particular variant of MS-DOS the clone used. What all three missed was the only way
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Well, it played out something like this [wikipedia.org]
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True. However, except for Apple, only those who tried that strategy survived. Not everybody who tried that strategy lived, but everybody who lived used that strategy.
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Mod up for that link.
I think Vector is a perfect example of disruptive technology. When they first choose CP/M it was the right choice. They couldn't switch too early from CP/M to a more advanced OS because that would be a downgrade. When more advanced OSes could run the same software they were caught hopelessly behind. Fundamentally Vector didn't own any technology that was unique to it. They had a mostly generic CP/M box with a few tweaks. One of the last CP/M manufacturers. I don't know the system
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Actually it was not Commodore that drove down CP/M prices. That was Osbourne then Kaypro.
Commodore is the the tragedy because Wintel PCs did not really match the Amiga until around 1995. The issue was marketing and expectations.
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Actually I knew people buying CP/M machines as late as 85 actually I knew some vertical markets that sold CP/M machines well into the early 90s.
Truth is that MS-DOS was not a lot better than CP/M for many years. It really was not until Lotus 123 and WordPerfect came out that MS-DOS was a lot better than CP/M. That combined with the price drop from the clone makers and you finally had the death of CP/M.
However by 1985 you had the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and the Mac. All of which were far better machines t
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Yes I would have to agree that the S100 was on the way out by then.
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Let me just point out the OSX machines are essentially variants on NeXT. NeXT released their first model spring of 1987 and was working hard on their stuff in 1985. Spring 1987 is probably around the time Vector would have released their 2nd version of the their cool stuff on the drawing board when customers would have had to transition.
Now if you are going to be transitioning in 1987... and the first fully object oriented graphic operating system which has concepts like the web (in primitive form) and e
Pre-cambrian computing (Score:5, Informative)
Prior to the IBM PC there was enormous diversity in computing. I have some early issues of Byte and the hardware in the ads is all over the place. Most of the names are long forgotten now.
The BBC did Micro Men [wikipedia.org], a cute (and mostly historically accurate) program about the rise and fall of Acorn, which happened in the same time period. They too got broadsided by IBM, but managed to develop the ARM processor before they imploded.
...laura
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Conversely, it wasn't until the IBM PC forced the market to converge on some common defacto standards that the market became something more than a bunch of weird quirky machines that wouldn't work together at all. The only thing binding together the home computer field to any common standard before IBM was RS-232 and that funny tone a 1200 baud modem makes.
Linux wouldn't even exist in a world where there were ten different quirky brands of personal computer all working in different directions. Some would
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Utter hogwash. Linux is a Unix. As such it can run pretty much anywhere because it's designed to be source compatible with itself. All you have to do is port it to another platform.
Linux is very much like CP/M in this respect, something you conveniently ignored.
Linux actually did run on ALL of the early competitors to the PC.
The first actual Linux user I ever met in the flesh ran it on an Atari. Atari even had it's own version of SystemV that it never quite embraced.
In truth, Linux ran on all of the 68K mac
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As such it can run pretty much anywhere because it's designed to be source compatible with itself. All you have to do is port it to another platform.
Utter hogwash!!!
Linus Torvalds on Linux:
It's mostly in C, but most people wouldn't call what I write C. It uses every conceivable feature of the 386 I could find, as it was also a project to teach me about the 386. As already mentioned, it uses a MMU, for both paging (not to disk yet) and segmentation. It's the segmentation that makes it REALLY 386 dependent (every task has a 64Mb segment for code & data - max 64 tasks in 4Gb. Anybody who needs more than 64Mb/task - tough cookies). [...] Some of my "C"-
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Linux (what became Slackware) started on the PC and ran exclusively on PC hardware for a very long time before it was ported to anything else. I still have the original floppy disks with that very early code to prove it. Once linux started to gain popularity, then it was ported to other platforms. But this was not for years after linux was running on pc hardware.
Credentials : old guy.
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Linux? Linux was originally on 386 PC clones. You're talking about computers that existed before then. Maybe you're thinking Minix or Xinu or some other Unix lookalike?
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And I am guessing that spaceyhackerlady does, in fact, know she is surrounded by linux machines.
My employers pay me to do cool shit, and we use Linux to do it. Company standard is CentOS, but my personal research/playpen box is Slackware.
FWIW, I've run Linux on x86, 68k, ARM and UltraSPARC. My home computer, the one I actually spend my own money on, is a Mac. It shares desk space with an x86 Linux box and a Raspberry Pi.
...laura
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certified as Unix.
this certification is obsolete, nobody cares about POSIX or Unix compatibility any more. All of the old Unixes have gone their own way, if you want to run well on them, you have to throw away your POSIX stuff and code directly to each platform.
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your post illustrates exactly why POSIX certification is not relevant, it has no actual meaning in reality
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I agree with your first point about convergence. The Microsoft / Intel / Western Digital Standard for platform (IBM essentially) was a huge deal for hardware standardization.
But I'm not sure about your second point. Linux exists comfortably on dozens of hardwares. Linux is a diverse ecosystem not a monoculture. Why would Linux (or something like it) have not done better if there were 10 quirky brands about? Heck that's pretty much the 1980s workstation market and there is where Unix pretty much evolved
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In the 1980's Unix nearly DIED on the scattered hardware base. That was the biggest cause of all it's problems at the time.
On the contrary, all of those ports are what made Unix a resilient portable operating system. Today we can easily port Unix to any new architecture, and that's because it enjoyed a period in the 80's (its codebase was much smaller and more pliable back then) when it was being ported left and right to every new computer.
You've got it wrong. Sure most of those old Unix vendors went down in flames, but Unix emerged from the flames as a better product.
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Let me point out most of the Unixes went down in the flames in the mid 1990s, not the 1980s, when the workstation and server market consolidated (around NT and Linux). Unix thrived on diversity.
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I don't think you are right here in a more general sense. Obviously something like the Linux kernel is a bad choice. But imagine the Linux toolset (i.e. the rest of the operating sys
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Died? Huh? That was the highpoint for commercial Linux. Commercial Linux in the 1980s was displacing other systems that had evolved in hardware monocultures because it handled the rapidly evolving workstation / server hardware. Your history is just backwards here.
Do you mean Unix? Linux 0.01 was released in 1991.
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We were talking about both. GP had said which induced response to what you are quoting, "In the 1980's Unix nearly DIED on the scattered hardware base. That was the biggest cause of all it's problems at the time." He was clearly talking abut big box Unixes in the Workstation era. Which is btw what I was talking about as well the "1980s workstation market"
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IBM didn't do this though. IBM itself got sidelined when they came out with PS2 and it wasn't compatible even with hacks. IBM did not want the clones, period.
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I'll have to watch that docco - After using BBC micros and BBC Model B in primary school, and the Acorn Archimedes in high school, I've followed Arm with a bit of interest. Their rise and fall and then stratospheric rise again from the ashes is an incredible story. By sheer volume, there are probably more ARM cores on the planet than any other architecture - ARM was originally the Acorn RISC Machine and was an incredible processor architecture in it's day (and, through licensing to other fabs, still is pret
they didnt shape anything! (Score:5, Insightful)
she was selling her HUSBANDS ram board, she didn't understand the business, when IBM entered her HUSBAND wanted to make a PC compatible she said no, so he made another company which outlived that CP/M disaster.
mismanagement by people who never understood the business from the getgo.
And super smooth alienating your cheif engineer without a plan B.
All they were was some lowly clone crap vendor that didn't shape any part of the industry, they just rode the wave into the ground because the CEO had no vision, and no clue as to what she was doing.
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From what I get they were good at selling the product. Much of what Steve Jobs was good at. The problem was they had no technical sense of things whatsoever and her husband was the only person there who actually got it.
Steve Jobs might not have be able to do anything by himself but at least he had some technical sense of what was good. Even if he did some design blunders occasionally. He was also smart enough not to kick Woz out in the early days and surrounded himself with strong technical teams.
Re:they didnt shape anything! (Score:4, Funny)
So with all those mistakes, it's basically like every other business ever.
Some things never change (Score:3, Funny)
"Meanwhile, Bob Harp felt the media paid too much attention to the fact that Carole and Lore were women, when it was he, in fact, who made the company possible with his hardware designs."
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The Woz always gets less attention than the Steve Jobs of this world.
Rise of clickbait headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
Calling them bored housewives is like describing Einstein's work as "Look what this bored patent clerk came up with..."
We may not be able to kill the clickbait in other headlines, but can we PLEASE stop this crap on slashdot thread titles?
Re:Rise of clickbait headlines (Score:4, Funny)
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I can see your point and I don't disagree with it. I don't think that was the point of the headline though.
I imagine the headline was intended to be a reflection of the time in which the company existed.
This is because there was a perception back then that women (ie:housewives) as the cultural roles has pin-holed them into were incapable of working or succeeding in these male dominated roles at the time.
We know that isn't true and those perceptions are not nearly as stark now as we have years and years of
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Aren't male entrepreneurs just bored men without the actual skills to get a real job?
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Let me ask you a question - have you ever pleasured yourself?
Would you like me to describe you as "Noted Masturbator"? It may be true that you have done it, but it is not an appropriate way to refer to you.
Similarly, they may have described themselves that way - probably after being asked a leading question - but that is NOT a good reason to describe them that way in the headline. Headlines should be the most important part of the story, n
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I am sure Einstein described himself as a patent clerk as well.
Let me ask you a question - have you ever pleasured yourself?
Would you like me to describe you as "Noted Masturbator"? It may be true that you have done it, but it is not an appropriate way to refer to you.
I am pretty adamant on that point--call me Master Masturbator, or expect a strongly worded letter from my attorney!
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Before you berate me for not reading the articles (which I have), you should actually read my reply.
dozens of such companies in 1970s (Score:4, Informative)
I thought the Radio Shack TRS-80 was best poised to succeed at the time since it was from an established company. But the killer app that propelled Apple was VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. Many businesses wanted an Apple-2 then.
Commodity hardware from Dell and Compaq and a generic operating system like PC-DOS eventaully consolidated the industry and wiped out most of the small operators.
Women Have Been Here Since the 1st Vacuum Tube (Score:4, Interesting)
I loved this story from the era of Byte. Most of my penile-brethern in the industry are not old enough to be connected to the earlier eras of computing where women were far more involved in the process. Not just the hardware, but also in software.
It is Grace Hopper who was among the early pioneers to crystallize the idea of a high level computer language (COBOL), and unlike a lot of other languages that have come and gone, COBOL is still around and much of Western civilization still depends on it, hidden away in the logic of CICS transactions. The role of women in computing was actually a lot more involved in its early years than now. To sell very expensive mainframes to corporations, ad men had to sell the idea that the machines were easy to use and took advantage of the "WOMEN R DUMB" stereotype by involving women nearly everywhere around the system from the operator console down to the armies of women driving IBM 029 card punch machines to enter lines of text in "files" of punched cards. System brochures nearly always featured women at the terminals, loading the tapes and pouring through printouts. That legacy showed itself again when the Y2K crisis hit and there was a sudden desperate urge to find COBOL programmers. I remember departments filled with nothing but old-hat ladies who still remembered how to set up their JCL and editing their "job cards" [IBMspeak for 'lines of text'] to test date-fixed code. Seated nearby was a team C++ where if there were 100 of them, perhaps only 1 would be female. The C++ males, all in their 20s, were working on cheap PCs. The grandma coalition next door had control over a Sysplex beast with a $2 million dollar lease in a center with its own air conditioning plant.
When CompSci took off, computing was a new, unknown science to laypeople and it was sexy and exciting, much like biochem is now to girls who are being woo'd at to pursue a major in STEM. Women filled jobs as cryptoanalysts and manually programmed sorting machines with jumper plugs. Women dominated the role of the Systems Analyst, a job type that's still with us and is a role that many women still fill. In many fields of business, women still dominate user communities as women still outnumber men as users of tech.
The problem that exists right now is that there's not a lot of women who are writing instructions to feed into a compiler. I'm in a skyscraper with over 30 floors and I think I can count on one hand the number of women right now who are churning out code and with two hands the number who are debugging and syncing repos to GitHub.
Back when society was far more unkind to women, women had far more influence in tech than they do now. Now that there are legal protections, women have been enticed by recruiters into other sciences (there's a lot more women studying Chemistry than CompSci). The problem today isn't with some perceived gender barrier, or a glass ceiling. The problem is that male programmers haven't had any inclination to walk up to women that they know, show them what they do, how creative programming and system architecture can be, and that it's potentially lucrative and exciting.
STEM conferences only do so much, and nobody gives a rat's ass what celebs and pandering politicians have to say. It's really the folks who actually code day-in day-out who could help get more women back into a field they used to be in with far more gusto.
Not the games company (Score:2)
Annie (Score:2)
Was I the only one who would check out the Godbout ad for this? https://www.flickr.com/photos/... [flickr.com]
An Ode to the Vector 3, I miss thee (Score:3)
Built like a brick shithouse. Aluminum frame. Massively stable power supply with over-spec'd transformer and giant electrolytic. Gold plating on everything that mattered (yes many in that day did not). Rugged S-100 backplane with plenty proper reinforcement to the frame, which in the days of S-100 when routine maintenance was important, was key. Some of us remember the days when you could insert and remove components from computer systems without making the whole machine scooting around like a puppy avoiding a bath.
A B&W memory mapped display that was extremely stable and flicker free even when the whole screen was blinking, which involves massive spikes in CRT current. Screen refresh was smooth. In those days most computer displays failed what I called the 'blink test', where you fill the display with blink/reverse type and watch the characters in the corners. On a black/white blink they would tend to shift position a little. Vector's did not. Beautiful Cherry keyboard, keys metal spring-squishy with a firm stop and perfect debounce which was handled in software by the 'monitor' (=BIOS).
This made Vector's own CP/M word processing software MEMORITE one of the most amazing tools for a secretary to become accustomed to. It may be hard to believe but once upon a time, word wrapping and shifting paragraphs on the screen as you type usually was a flickery, clunky process. Some early word processors even delayed reformatting until you left off typing or ended a paragraph, to minimize the jarring flicker and redraw. When you typed into MEMORITE individual words repositioned themselves to smoothly you actually had a mental impression of them moving as if they were real objects. This simple phenomenon was unprecedented in those days of 4Mhz Z80, even in machines with memory mapped display.
When people who used Vector 3 and MEMORITE were forced to migrate to 'newer, better' PC-compatible word processing platforms running WordPerfect and MSWord, they felt as if they had lost a friend. One secretary who found the Vector Graphic to be the only machine who could keep up with her typing without losing characters or making the screen into an unwatchable flicker-fest, had to transition to MSWord on early Windows. She asked me, "Are things going to get worse from now on?"
Maintaining Vector Graphic machines gave my own career a great start. But it was also a curse. Now I'm more conscious and outspoken of crappy engineering than most other people.
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I dunno what your criticism is. It's factually accurate, which is (by Slashdot standards) pretty remarkable. In fact, the "bored housewife" angle is actually the primary difference between this story and lots of other "start computer company up in (garage|basement|warehouse) in the late '70s, get stomped flat by IBM in the early '80s" stories.
Is this a SJW thing?
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Whether or not it's factually accurate, the "bored housewife" angle this day in age has a certain connotation when used in internet news that, fairly or otherwise, tends to color how I read an article. I e
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What is it with SJWs that makes them imagine they or [insert preferred minority] are the target of hostility. If you knew anything about the neckbeards and mouthbreathers that are programmers you would know that they're hostile to everybody. Just because some women felt put off by the hostility and let that inform their decision to get out of the industry doesn't make it misogyny. The only thing fueling an upswing in misogyny are all the people who poo pooed the computer industry as a fad who now want to ge
Re:A story of how women were (Score:5, Insightful)
People are quick to assign characteristics of an individual to a group to whom the individual belongs. Look at how often an individual with a characteristic that isn't of the majority is aked their opinion as if it represents that of the minority to whom they are a part. Unfortunately it's also inaccurate. If Mike asks Johnny, who's a nerd, if he likes pizza, and Johnny replies no, he doesn't like pizza, Mike might draw the conclusion that nerds don't like pizza, even when it may only be Mike that doesn't like pizza, or even something as simple as Mike can't process dairy, so he can't eat the stuff even if he wants to.
I think you're also misusing Social Justice Warrior, which I think means someone otherwise-unaffected by the injustice that acts as a self-appointed mercenary and doesn't coordinate their efforts with those who actually are affected by the injustice either. They think they're doing good, and for all we know many may actually be doing good, but at the same time if they're not consulting those affected by the injustice and acting in-concert with those people's movements and leadership then they might actually cause more harm than good if they make the movement itself visibly look bad.
As to your other point, about, "neckbeards and mouthbreathers that are programmers you would know that they're hostile to everybody," this is actually more true than a lot of people realize. There are cases where women have perceived behavior in the workplace to be hostile toward them, when in reality they're actually being treated the same as the men are treating each other; in-effect they have been accepted as, "just one of the guys," but they don't realize that the guys treat each other like crap and now they're just getting the same as everyone else gets. Certainly that's not all cases of workplace harassment, but I have seen it first-hand and usually it's the result of the entire workplace degenerating, and companies end up cracking down on it in strange ways, like with uniforms, work-area inspections, and other things that simply keep employees too busy to harang each other. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the employer structurally reorganizes instead.
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now they're just getting the same as everyone else gets.
So what you're saying is that men are too stupid to complain about bad working conditions and that the problem with women is that they won't play along with this bullshit.
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I've known some women that will participate and can be as bad at offending as some of the worst men, I've known women that participate some because it can help them get a leg-
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Unfortunately just about everyone forgets to treat others as they themselves want to be treated
This is 100% wrong, people treat others EXACTLY the way that they are expecting others to treat them. If they are mean and rude to other people it is because they are expecting other people to be mean and rude to them. If they are kind and understanding to others it is because they expect others to be kind and understanding.
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just about everyone in the system is upset by it even if it weeds-out the bad apples and makes it better for everyone else.
just about everyone gets upset by a call to treat people equally and with compassion? really?
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Is this your first time on slashdot?
Re:A story of how women were (Score:5, Insightful)
This is 100% wrong, people treat others EXACTLY the way that they are expecting others to treat them..
That is often false. There are many people who expect to be treated with honor and deference, but treat everyone else like crap.
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Re:A story of how women were (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, [too many] men are too stupid to complain and tend to keep their job and [too many] women are stupid enough to complain and then be fired or quit when things don't change. I do love have you spin it as the stupidity of men and the problem with women, though. It nicely twists it as though men are actually stupid for valuing their job over the abuse when they realize they likely can't do anything about it--quitting doesn't really count since that doesn't change the company they were working at and their new job may be as bad or worse. And it (presumably) sarcastically states it as a "problem with women" that they'd dare to change the status quo and when they're unfairly fired or when they have enough and quit, at least they were "smart" to cause "problem(s)" and fight an injustice system. Well, unfortunately without either readily enforced laws (lawsuits don't count since they're not readily enforced), massively unionized boycott of such behavior, or having a new CEO/president/whatever who really wants to see change happen, things aren't going to change at the scale of the endemic problem being resolved in any sustained, wide-spread fashion. Everything else and you're just accepting that a lot (if not a majority) of companies will be shitty; the shittier companies will likely get worse (as those who wish to abuse will gravitate to the companies that can abuse in); and people will either be paid more for it, derive some other sort of in-job benefit (easier work, less required overtime, etc), or they'll suffer without any real extra benefit because the job market is well saturated and there isn't much room to migrate to one of the better companies.
Or in short, if you're the breadwinner and have had a lifetime of learning to put up with bullshit to be "manly" you'll tolerate a shitty job. And anything less and you'll be called a pussy or a "Millennial" or whatever and people will decry you without really looking at the why. I mean, honestly, considering the advancements in productivity, if you're working more than ~20 hours/week, you're the same sort of chump as everyone else Because the 40 hour work week was an arbitrary standard to set (8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure, 8 hours of sleep with 2 days off) and as much there's no reason we couldn't or shouldn't have a second unionized revolution to drop the hours to work in half again and maybe even add an extra day off a week.
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I don't have points, but this AC needs some upvotes.
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I think (at least in my case) that it is simply below my give-a-crap threshold.
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Women are bad at math! Oh the humanity. In the meanwhile, men are rapist, misogynist, violent abuser.
Feminist suffer from psychological projection. They hate men, feel bad about it and therefore assume that men must hate women.
If there is a 'gender club' somewhere it is a women club, and it is the whole society. That feminist non-sense is annoying and I am sick of seeing it on slashdot.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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I used to think the stereotype of SJWs being self hating beta CIS males was likewise bullshit until we had article after article like this one [newsbusters.org] where a white male liberal professor calls for the extermination of all white males. BTW notice how he doesn't say white females, that is because to bigoted fucks like him white females are to be given as prizes to black males for "historical oppression". He even says "At least a white woman can have sex with a black man and make a brown baby but what can a white male do? He's good for nothing. " So...yeah, sometimes stereotypes are true . . .
Did you miss the caveat the journalist added at the bottom of the story, noting that he picked the story up from a satirical news blog?
Re:A story of how women were (Score:5, Informative)
What is it with SJWs that makes them imagine they or [insert preferred minority] are the target of hostility.
SJWs always project. They hate everyone, so they believe everyone hates them, too.
Re:A story of how women were (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the article stands on its own as an attempt to show how (insert favorite "oppressed" group) was relevant in major events in history. You can hardly sit through a history course anymore without a somewhat distracting aside explaining that soandso was gay, and/or possibly a woman, or had some mixed heritage etc. While simultaneously trying to explain that history is about critical thinking, and distracting that critical thinking with irrelevant asides, a mixed message is sent.
There's no reason a woman could not have been a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but as it happens, a woman wasn't. Irrelevant housewives in a failed company don't really figure in. The article even points out that there were quite a few attempts at a PC back then, most of which failed when the IBM PC manifested. Even Apple almost did not survive it. I would argue, additionally, that even Apple had next to 0 influence on the PC market, except perhaps in encouraging Windows to exist before it was ready (but ultimately sealing Apple's fate as an also-ran in the PC market). Even very significant companies were destroyed that really did define direction at the time: Sun? SGI? Ironically even IBM is not in the business anymore, and it's big iron division is facing a lot of challenges from what IBM itself created. These were all the significant bits of computer history.
Talking about two housewives in a company that failed before it started is a feel-good story at best, a lame attempt at social justice at worst.
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It's fairly apparent that you weren't around the beginnings of the microcomputer revolution of the '70's. When the Altair appeared on the cover of the January 1975 Popular Electronics (still have my copy) its designer, Ed Roberts, expected to sell a few dozen - a niche market for geeky electronics hobbyists. IBM would not have even gotten into the market if it weren't for the likes of companies like Vector Graphic, Processor Technology, NorthStar, Godbout, Morrow Designs, Cromemco, PolyMorphic and many othe
What what it's worth (Score:5, Insightful)
There are bits in the article that would go contrary to the usually SJW talking points.
For example:
"When asked in a 1981 interview why she did not specifically hire more women at Vector, Lore remarked that she hired whomever was best for the job, regardless of sex.
Today, Lore says she never encountered significant opposition from men in the industry. When she heard rumors of the the term "ice maiden" used to describe her, she took the name-calling as a sign of her effectiveness and moved forward."
What I see here is that the women who did make it in to tech, such as Lore, don't go around looking to be offended or victimized. Upon hearing rumors of calling her "ice maiden", she just took it in stride as a sign that she's doing something right.
Contrast that to today's feminists, who wants us to "ban bossy", and take being called an SJW as a sign to be doing something right
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Well then, you kind of failed thinking critically about the larger context.
On the one hand, you have feminist stating how women were historically disenfranchised from all matters of career and business. On the other, you have all of these women celebrated for apparent having careers.
Well, which is it then? Either they were disenfranchised, or history has a tendency of making unicorns.
Hell, talk to your mom and grandmother about what it was like being a woman back in the day. I did. My mom has run several su
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There's no reason a woman could not have been a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, ...
No reason? Really?
In their early careers, both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had many meetings (with investors, prospective clients, and other companies) that where key to their success at the time. In many of those meetings they didn't have much of a product or results to show, relying mostly on selling themselves as "someone who can get the job done" (e.g. Gates initial deal with IBM, selling them an OS that he didn't have yet). So you are saying that none of those meetings would have a different outcome if t
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You are ascribing importance to a company that had no significant impact on the industry simply because it was founded by two housewives. How is that not asinine tripe?
Re:A story of how women were (Score:5, Insightful)
...distracting that critical thinking with irrelevant asides...
That's a flat-out idiotic comment.
First made first my by history professor in freshman year in college. She was a woman. She predicted Scotland would try for independence one day in my lifetime (and we laughed), and that Russia would once again become a talked about threat, in addition to a number of other things. This was 20 years ago. She seemed pretty smart, but she wasn't the type to suffer idiocy.
Talking about two housewives in a company that failed before it started is a feel-good story at best, a lame attempt at social justice at worst.
The company was highly successful at the time, went public, and years later failed after the IBM/DOS combination came to dominate. Yet because the company was founded by two "housewives", you deny its success and importance.
Or, because housewives was the headline term, and the subject of the article, thus it was brought in to the discussion by the author. If this was about how influential Vector Graphics was, the title might have read "Vector Graphic - The Influential PC Vendor You Never Heard Of" or something along those lines. Clearly however, this article is about two housewives and their failed start-up.
Absolutely nothing in the article substantiates your claim that Vector Graphics was at all relevant to the PC industry other than an ability to get headlines and make itself known. It failed in every way that marked the success of the PC, was defeated in the PC market by Apple and was eliminated entirely by the IBM PC. It's one of many, many companies that had a brief moment in the sun and disappeared. This article isn't about that, it's about the two housewives who ran it and the ensuing drama of the 70s tech biz. It's entire value is "hey look what these women almost did", you could say the same about countless people in countless businesses, the only thing unusual is that it's two women, particularly two housewives. That doesn't make it newsworthy for most people, particularly if you see no reason why housewives couldn't be successful. It's more useful to people who somehow think they can't.
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I had never heard of it before. People talk about the TRS-80, the Atari 800, Commodore 64, Sinclair, I even heard of the Dragon, Oric. Never this one.
Then again it seems to be a lot older. From the era of the Altair 8800 so its little wonder I never heard about it.
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The computers you mention were marketed to home users and individual users. ( For example, I knew several proffesors who bought them to play with the then new researxch area fractals. )
Vectors were sold to businesses that is why you never heard of them.
Re:A story of how women were (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I understand why most Americans can't come to grips with their slavery heritage.
I don't understand this constant call for retroactive guilt. Yes, America has a heritage of slavery. Yes, it is shameful and nothing about it was ever right.
But that was then and this is now. Why are we today, we who had nothing to do with the sins of the past, and who (with the exception of some wackos) completely reject the idea of slavery, told to feel guilt and told that we have to somehow feel inferior because people in the past did bad things?
Should the Japanese and Germans of today feel guilty about war crimes that they themselves did not commit?
Of course, we all need to remain vigilant, to ensure that the past is not repeated. But that's more a matter of human nature than something specifically American (or German or Japanese or what-have-you).
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There are plenty of sins of the present to go around. But slavery in America was specifically mentioned, and whatever today's American ills may be, that's not one of them.
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What a load of crap. What we're responsible for today is to make sure those things (or equivalent bad things) don't happen again. Collectively or individually we can't be responsible for what happened when we weren't even here.
I'd swear that there is a whole contingent who just loves feeling guilty.
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No the parent is right. This was a moderate sized fish, and one of many in a then very tiny pond. IBM and to a lessor extent Apple made the market. This company was just one of many PC vendors, few people out side the valley and various hobby communities could have ever named.
The technology they had was largely stuff from elsewhere. In fact that is what in many ways hobbled them. The few places where they might have been leading edge were being independently replicated else by designs that were as good
Re:A story of how women were (Score:5, Informative)
...distracting that critical thinking with irrelevant asides...
That's a flat-out idiotic comment.
[a whole bunch of other confused tripe]
Talking about two housewives in a company that failed before it started is a feel-good story at best, a lame attempt at social justice at worst.
The company was highly successful at the time, went public, and years later failed after the IBM/DOS combination came to dominate. Yet because the company was founded by two "housewives", you deny its success and importance.
It was not "founded by two housewives". It was founded on the basis of a product created by a man who gifted his bored wife with it to sell. She subsequently took the product, kicked him out and failed miserably. Seriously, read the article.
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You don't seem to understand how slashdice works...
Re:A story of how women were (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll just leave this quote from the second paragraph of the article here: "a PC designed by Lore's husband, Bob Harp."
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Lore was the proverbial Jobs or Gates of that particular enterprise.
Re:A story of how women were (Score:5, Insightful)
Ouch.
"Bob Harp's memory board worked well, and he recognized that it could serve as a lucrative commercial product. Lacking the time and resources to commercialize it, he put it on the back burner for almost a year. But in 1976, when his wife and Ely were trying to hatch a business, he offered his Altair memory board as a potential product.
As exciting as the opportunity sounded to Lore, computers represented completely foreign territory for both her and Ely (and, for that matter, nearly everyone else on the planet in 1976). Lore recalls: "I called my friend and I said, 'Carole, what do you think about starting a computer company? I have this little 8K RAM board.' She said, 'What’s a RAM board?'""
It get's much, much worse:
"With a good technical underpinning and a focus on style and aesthetics, they knew their boards could stand ahead of the pack. The pair even went so far as to seek out specifically-hued capacitors that would not clash with the other components on their circuit boards. "I don’t know what people thought of us: two females looking for colored capacitors," Ely told InfoWorld in 1982. "But we were interested in what colors went into our boards." "
All in all, it's more of a confirmation of traditional gender roles than it is of breaking through them. Bonus classic permeating theme: gloryless underappreciated innovative techies versus fairly run-of-the-mill wildly successful sales people (yes, I'm biased).
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You left out that they failed when they did not listen to the husband/techie/mans advice and produced a PC compatible.
Had they done that they might have been Compaq.
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I bow my head in shame.
'gets'
I meant 'gets'.
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Hi sexconcker (1179573) (Score:2)
Hi user:sexconker (1179573), we know it's you, you forgot to check the "Post Anonymously" box earlier:
http://news.slashdot.org/comme... [slashdot.org]
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tipper gore made rap music popular
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Are you still mimeographing your newsletter? I'd like a copy.