How Two Bored Housewives 1970s Helped Create The PC Industry

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In April 1977, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak rented a booth at the formative industry conference for the personal computer, the First West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. They were there to launch Apple's first breakthrough machine, the Apple II.

 

What few people know today is that only a few rows away at the same show, two women from Southern California were busy launching an innovative machine of their own. Lore Harp and Carole Ely of Westlake Village brought along the Vector 1, a PC designed by Lore's husband, Bob Harp. The computer derived its title from the name of their young company, Vector Graphic, Inc.

 

At a time when Vector and Apple were both tiny firms looking to gain a footing in an entirely new market, it was not instantly obvious which company would become more successful—for example, Byte magazine's report on the conference mentioned Vector but spilled no ink on Apple, which would eventually become the most valuable company on the planet.

 

But unlike Apple, Vector vanished from the face of the earth. It faded from our collective memory because it did not survive the massive industry upheaval brought about by the release of the IBM PC in late 1981. Very few PC makers did. But the story of how the Vector trio went from nothing to soaring success—and then collapse—is a tale worth retelling.....

 

 

https://www.fastcompany.com/3047428/how-two-bored-1970s-housewives-helped-create-the-pc-industry

[abarbarian]

That is such a cool article. I love this snippet.

 

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 colours went into our boards."

 

and this,

 

 

In 2015, the tech industry's gender gap remains a topic that generates headlines. It would be easy to conclude that this gap was an original sin of a male-dominated industry. But we've forgotten how two women from California ran a firm that pioneered influential practices such as attention to product aesthetics, vertical integration (Vector has its own in-house software developers), and establishing training networks, providing packaged PC solutions, and treating employees like an extended family. Some of what Vector pioneered is now intertwined into the tech industry's DNA.

Thanks to Vector, the origins of the personal computer cannot be separated from the story of women in technology. The personal computer has always belonged to all of us.