Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

article says

> With her friend Carole Ely, she grew their company, Vector Graphic, into a major manufacturer of microcomputers

wikipedia says

> Vector Graphic sales peaked in 1982, by which time the company was publicly traded, at $36 million. It faltered soon after...

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

taking a microcomputer company from nothing to a near-billion-dollar market cap on the public markets is nothing to sneeze at. on the other hand, tens of thousands of microcomputers per year doesn't qualify as 'a major manufacturer of microcomputers'. commodore sold three hundred thousand c64s in 01982. apple broke a billion dollars in sales that year. lore harp's company had almost 4% of that. you could reasonably describe mits, imsai, commodore, apple, atari, and tandy/radio shack as 'major manufacturers of microcomputers' in that time period, but not vector. they were small fry, like heath/zenith or cromemco

this unforgivable level of puffery suggests that much of the article may be false (as valley_guy_12 points out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39972703, this puffery is something it has in common with the company's name, even if it doesn't quite rise to the level of 'intergalactic digital research')

"unforgivable level of puffery" seems like an overreaction.

Apple's total sales in 1978 [1] were only 30% higher than Vector's in 1979 [2]. Yeah, the industry growth at the time means comparing even consecutive years gets dicey, but I don't think the gap between the two was enormous at that point. Comparable to Apple in the late 70s sounds pretty major to me.

Also, it is reasonable to say "major" is an absolute description that just means "pretty big" not "one of the biggest". As you mention, their sales peak (IMO, past the company's relevance peak) is pretty big in absolute terms.

Extrapolating this disagreement into "much of the article may be false" is ... confusing.

[1] https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/april/...

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

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

The rather balanced 1985 LA Times article posted by lr1970 ought to be instructive for the folks here that think the year zero was sometime in their late adolescence or early adulthood. There has been a hunger for the "women beating all odds" story for a long time now. From it:

>Remember Lore Harp? The housewife-turned-MBA who was splashed on the cover of Inc. magazine, lionized in Savvy and interviewed at reverent length by the Harvard Business Review?

>If you have forgotten, it’s not surprising. Vector Graphic, the company Lore and Bob Harp founded nine years ago on their kitchen table in Westlake Village, was ambushed a few years back by management blunders and a good-sized competitor by the name of IBM.