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Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

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Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#31

If you enjoyed this, back in 2015 I wrote a feature about Lore Harp McGovern and her business partners for Fast Company that goes into the creation of Vector Graphic in detail: https://www.fastcompany.com/3047428/how-two-bored-1970s-hous...

I knew this was familiar but I couldn't remember where I had read it before :-)

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#32
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how did remote first work in the 60s? Did they post in punchcards? TTYs weren't really much of a thing at that stage, were they?

Write the program down on paper, then type it in or punch cards. 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.

We had a single apple II at our school. It was responsible for me failing most of my classes and getting into programming.

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.

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#33

Hoping for an upcoming movie in the vein of BlackBerry (2023)

In case you didn't know, that movie was a lot of fiction.

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.

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#35

Interestingly enough the empire fell when the Vector 4 suffered the same fate of Commodore (albeit later) when the Vector 4 specs were leaked. Although, there were a few blunders on the wikipedia page but this was also indicative of the era during the IBM PC / DOS dominance. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic

Yeah - one thing that didn't make the edit unfortunately was a few paragraphs on this. They'll make the book chapter though, when I write that.

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.

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#36
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how did remote first work in the 60s? Did they post in punchcards? TTYs weren't really much of a thing at that stage, were they?

Coding forms, accumulated until someone had access to a keypunch. Turnaround time could be days, which encouraged being very scrupulous when coding.

I remember our group of students would chip in on flowers and chocolates for the girl who was punching the cards. Every mistake meant manually cutting new holes and mask taping the extra holes to arrive at the correct character.

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#37

If you enjoyed this, back in 2015 I wrote a feature about Lore Harp McGovern and her business partners for Fast Company that goes into the creation of Vector Graphic in detail: https://www.fastcompany.com/3047428/how-two-bored-1970s-hous...

Reading that back in the day was one of the reasons she was on my list for this series to write about. Was the first time I'd heard of her!

(Love your ongoing blog and output)

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#38

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

Rest assured Steve is very much on my long-list!

If Every commission 'season two' of this series, then I'll likely focus on figures from the software side of Silicon Valley. Steve makes that list in a heartbeat.

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#39

[flagged]

To be fair, the fame of Steve Jobs is some of a different story: after his departure from Apple, he had been kind of a persona non grata, and later, with the demise of NeXT (BTW also known for its flat hierarchy and salary structure), not much talked about, either. It was really with the resurgence of Apple and Jobs' 3rd or 4th comeback that he became idolized, especially after the iPhone. This is quite a biography, and it took 30 years and rebuilding the then most valuable company from what seemed to be its sure ruin to achieve this popularity.

Re: Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

#40
I remember seeing a Vector Graphics computer at a computer store around 1978, when I was shopping for my first computer. I was excited by the name Vector Graphics, only to be disappointed to learn that it was a meaningless name, and their computers had nothing to do with vectors or graphics. I vaguely remember that it was a generic business machine (maybe with a 16 bit version?) with nothing to recommend it to a hobbyist over the competition.

In that era Apple had an enormous lead in graphics, software, and peripheral cards.

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