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
replies(8):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley
[0] She hired all the female IBM coders who couldn't make a career at IBM
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.
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!
* IISc - Indian Institute of Science
* Madras, now Chennai was probably an overnight drive in the late 60s.
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.
https://www.manager-magazin.de/hbm/eine-firma-ohne-bueros-a-...
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
In that era Apple had an enormous lead in graphics, software, and peripheral cards.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Even the founders of Commodore, which was 10x more successful, are not household names.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
That is because of the problems than have been mounting in tech because people only hired people that looked like them.
I do not understand what the problem is with DEI. (I am not in the USA, perhaps I am missing out). Making sure that no one is left behind, because they were over looked, seems like a good thing to me.
I’d love to read more about these products and their history. It was all very opaque. Even back then.
I don't know what the current MO of DEI programs is, but I hope they're expansive by also targeting ageism and other present day discriminations.
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.
> 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')
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd love to hear thoughts on this take about just how inclusive the tech industry from women, or LGBTA or BiPoC individuals.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-20-fi-2173-s...
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...
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).
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.
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.
This sound a lot like the "just asking questions", esp because of the "seems like a good thing to me" bit, like you know it's a mischaracterisation of the problem.
If you really don't understand, read what people write.
If all you believe DEI is what you characterised as above, then you aren't reading any dissenting opinion.
and a lot of other people have the opposite view, only to be told their subjective opinion doesn't count.
"unconscious bias" has certainly spurred/influenced policies wrt DEI, despite its dubious academic basis.
>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.
It is useless marketing bullshit that serves only to enrich the race grifters that plague our society.
(I will say this is a bit of an extreme take, there are definitely genuine DEI people, probably some effective DEI programs, etc, but by and large, as an industry [which it is] it is completely shiesty)
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)
To be fair I have never seen a hiring decision made on DEI grounds. its always talent/skill first. So I am not complaining about bullshit DEI hiring, I am complaining about programs where companies hire speakers for absurd fees to come give lipservice to cool black culture is and how shitty white people are. Its such an obvious scam and its painful to watch everyone get brow beaten into public self flagellation.
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.
(PSA: "you guys" is gender neutral)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone has countless reasons to fail. Sex is by far among the smallest of those reasons.
Perceiving old systems that grew up on essential dedicated roles based on biology as sexist is a modern day bias against old eras that needs its own verbiage: time-ism?
Not to go into debate, but my overall outlook is that certain relational contracts are embedded in the formation of relationships. Drifting from those contracts creates a rift. This isn’t essentialism. This is expectationism.
I've spoken with many women about this and volunteered alongside many others on various projects aiming to help tackle these issues such as Women in Tech Netherlands. The women I've encountered have universally recognised the importance of allyship. Who are the women you spoke with who laughed?
You can read about that's importance of allyship here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/women-tech-why-allyship-impor...
You might disagree with what she says but you'll struggle you convince me that I should give more weight to your views on this than the actual women involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
(Note Steve Jobs used the Osborne effect to promote the Mac at the expense of Apple's own Lisa.)
My mother retired in the 2000's earning more than 2M / yr running her own business. That's net, not gross. A single mother of two. My earliest memories are in a homeless shelter. It's not a competition to know someone. While not a woman, I earn in the top 1%. I credit my mom for that.
It's obvious that people who focus on what's in their control, tend to produce results.
Ally groups are great for networking. It's just not what I'm talking about.
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!
By smallest you mean over 50% of the population.
Giving everyone a dollar is the same as giving no one a dollar. -Econ 101
Compare that with say, severe anxiety, inability to take tests, low IQ. Or even just lack of interview experience, and never asking for a raise.
These last two dramatically affect income and are true of a strikingly large number of women compared with men.[1]
Is it possible that women aren't asking for raises because everyone keeps telling them that they need "special" help (implied inferiority)? That they won't get raises, so why bother?
I think it's a factor. I think your argument, while well intentioned, might be causal in preventing women's success.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/women-are-still-not-a...
>This is called whataboutery.
He brought up the plight of another group, and you're saying, "What about women?"
I'm sure your goals are pure, and you really want to help women, but you're studying schools of thought that serve to dismantle your efforts.
A solution that treats one group as lesser than another will never be free from hypocrisy, just as it is not free from it here.
Fair for only me isn't fair. No one thinks so. Think about it.