[HN Gopher] How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC ...
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How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry (2015)
Author : edtechdev
Score : 222 points
Date : 2021-08-19 09:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fastcompany.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fastcompany.com)
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| > Lore Harp and Carole Ely of Westlake Village brought along the
| Vector 1, a PC designed by Lore's husband, Bob Harp.
|
| Interesting choice of headline.
| [deleted]
| vegardx wrote:
| A colleague of mine got started programming because her fancy
| sewing machine was programmed using Cobol or Fortran.
|
| It's really fun to hear stories about when she quite literally
| just started showing up at Oslo University to sneak into classes
| because she found it so fun.
|
| Now she's maintaining one of our mainframes at work. Extremely
| knowledgeable and kind. The kind of person you feel lucky to
| know.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > sneak into classes
|
| All of the lectures at UiO are actually open to anyone as far
| as I know. You don't need to be a student there or anything.
| You can just walk right in. And as long as you are quiet, and
| the room is not too full, I think it's ok.
|
| But considering how inexpensive university education is in
| Norway, it may be an even better idea to sign up for classes
| because then you get to deliver assignments and get them graded
| and so on.
|
| Then again, when I attended university at UiO a lot of the
| intro classes were not inspiring. (And the same is probably
| true for most any university I think.) And I ended up not
| finishing my degree at UiO. So going to some lectures for the
| topics that you find the most interesting instead of enrolling
| as a student may not be such a bad idea either.
|
| One of the things I enjoyed the most about my time at UiO was
| this student union that was there. Lots of really skillful
| people were members of that student union and I learned quite a
| bit from some of them. I spent a lot of time in the location of
| that student union.
|
| In fact I can probably say, honestly, that I spent more time in
| that student union than I did in classes. Other members of that
| student union was also how I got to know about HN originally.
| This was over a decade ago now.
|
| It was a special place, and I am so happy that it existed and
| that I got to experience it.
|
| The building that we had our location in was eventually
| decommissioned and we got new location in a basement without
| windows. This killed the student union. No one wanted to hang
| out in a room deep down in a basement with no windows. And this
| new location was very inaccessible too, you had to walk through
| many corridors down in the basement to get to the room.
|
| Some of the people that had been doing the most for that
| student union started a new hacker space in Oslo. I've only
| been to the new hacker space a couple of times but it's a
| pretty nice place too I think.
|
| The website of the student union continued to run on a server
| at UiO for several years after activity stopped, but the server
| went down a while back. I guess either the University Center
| for Information Technology (USIT) at UiO did a cleanup in the
| server rooms and found no one to speak to about the server, or
| they were informed that the student union was inactive, or the
| hardware in the server may have just malfunctioned after years
| of operation.
| bgmeister wrote:
| Norsk Data machines?
| unixhero wrote:
| Current day mainframes in use in Norway would be IBM
| mainframes.
|
| Telenor, Nordea, DNB or Insurance companies...
| leejoramo wrote:
| Around 1983 my Eagle Scout project was to get computers for
| students at the Elementary School I had attended in central
| California. One of the companies that presented their systems was
| Vector.
|
| Their demo was the first time I got to play with an S-100. I
| remember they sent a woman from their corporate offices and an
| African American salesperson to talk to me. That meeting always
| shaped for me an expectation of diversity in the workplace.
|
| Looking back, I wonder if the woman at the demo was Lore or
| Carole
|
| Vector was too expensive for my project. I did end up getting
| three Apple ]['s for student use and a HeathKit CP/M system for
| the office. The school ended up being the first elementary school
| in the school district to give students access to computers.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Neat. About that time, maybe a year before a teacher of mine
| had a TRS-80 all-in-one in class. Decades ahead that one. Also
| in Ventura County.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#modeliii
| dang wrote:
| A couple of past threads:
|
| _How Two Bored 1970s Housewives Helped Create the PC Industry
| (2015)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249920 - Jan
| 2018 (29 comments)
|
| _How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9929333 - July 2015 (69
| comments)
| heurisko wrote:
| Similar story in the UK, "Freelance Programmers" was created with
| the primary workforce of mothers with a technical background.
|
| The creator of the company, (now Dame) Stephanie Shirley, wrote
| about it in her memoirs "Let it Go", which I can recommend.
|
| They eventually had to hire men, due to equality legislation. The
| attraction for women, however, was that they could work from
| home. Seems we have come full circle.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| The comments below about Apple, Wozniak, Jobs, et al are right.
| Those stories have been done to death. There were a lot of other
| people _not_ at Apple who were making fun, vital contributions to
| the PC industry, and I 'm working on a post about another one
| that almost no one remembers (teaser).
|
| A Silicon Valley legend was Dennis Barnhart [1], who crashed the
| Ferrari that he'd bought with his IPO money for Eagle Computer
| (remember them? I thought not.)
|
| [1]
| https://https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/10/business/corporat...
| wumms wrote:
| > The following year, Bob founded Corona Data Systems [0], which
| created one of the first IBM PC clones.
|
| One of their ads is titled "The Apple vs. IBM debate is over.
| Meet the Winner." [1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems
|
| [1] https://imgur.com/a/aDe5mkD
| ghaff wrote:
| One of those was the first PC I owned.
|
| The compatibility comment in the article was interesting. There
| was definitely a period when bug for bug PC compatibility was
| not widely appreciated by a lot of companies because it hadn't
| historically been a thing. Even Corona had a weird one-off
| monochrome graphics mode that basically no one supported (and
| made it incompatible with add-on graphics cards like Hercules).
|
| I think it's also easy for people to forget that in, say, 1982
| if you were shopping for a computer a PC clone wasn't
| necessarily the obvious choice.
| eloeffler wrote:
| Outrun by a bored college dropout and his friend
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| "PC" is an IBM specific marketing term. The computers made by
| Vector Graphic were not PCs, they were microcomputers. The
| correct generic term is microcomputer, e.g. the Apple II was a
| microcomputer, never a PC. This naming convention persists today,
| it's unusual to refer to a Mac as a PC.
|
| It's a small detail but it's an important one and makes it seem
| like this article was poorly researched or the title is
| clickbait. Vector Graphic never entered the PC industry though
| they may have helped create the microcomputer industry.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic
| thoughtsimple wrote:
| At the time PC was generic for personal computer. Only later
| was it associated with the IBM PC.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| If anything that is the opposite of what is true. At the time
| IBM invented the term to market the IBM 5150.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
| ChickeNES wrote:
| No: https://www.wired.com/2000/12/the-first-pc/
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| If you read the Wikipedia page for Vector Graphic, you'll
| clearly see it states they produced microcomputers, not PCs.
| Contrast with IBM, Compaq.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I find the headline to be promise more than it delivered.
|
| A women had a husband (Bob) who was a genius at design and
| developing hardware accessories and later a full computer. He had
| little interest in running the business.
|
| His work created a hardware company called Vector Computers.
|
| His wife and another woman ran the business aspect of the company
| and the company did well.
|
| It did well thanks to the husband's identification of a huge
| market that offered a lot of opportunity.
|
| The company grew and this is certainly a credit for the two
| female executives. They were pioneers both as female executives
| and within getting in early in the computer industry.
|
| Once Bob learned about this soon to be released IBM PC he
| requested and begged the company to start making IBM PC clones
| and accessories. He said the company had a year left unless it
| started embracing the PC
|
| The now soon to be ex wife rejected this idea and kept the
| company running the same as always. She also fired her soon to be
| ex-husband.
|
| She did take the company public within that year and was generous
| allotting stocks to every employee in the company. That was also
| a first.
|
| I hope everyone sold their stock as soon as they could, given
| that the company died 2 years later. Because they are failed to
| adapt to a changing market and rejected advice of the technical
| founder and the guy who identified the market segment they
| started in.
| shever73 wrote:
| Thank you for the TLDR, as soon as I opened the site on mobile
| and was greeted with uncloseable video ads and a tiny area of
| screen real estate to actually read the article, I closed it
| down.
| le-mark wrote:
| You should read the article, this is an uncharitable tldr.
| I'd always Heard about s100 and cpm but I didn't realize
| there was this category of high priced business computers
| like the vector in the story.
| pavlov wrote:
| Now take this story and replace the wife with Steve Jobs and
| the husband with Woz. It's basically the same.
|
| Jobs also rejected the advice of the technical co-founder in
| various matters, and insisted on staying away from producing
| IBM compatibles. In the end it worked out for Apple but not for
| Vector.
|
| With a different roll of the dice, it might have been the other
| way around. Luck plays a huge role in startup success.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| > In the end it worked out for Apple but not for Vector.
|
| Did it? It very nearly did not.
|
| Unlike Vector, Steve Jobs always had a focus on something
| very special in mind: the very best design, of course
| (perhaps similar to the Vector CEO), but, more importantly,
| _technical_ things that would re-define the industry, like
| windowed OS 's and mice.
|
| And, even that relentless focus on having the best user
| experience was not enough to save Apple! The only thing that
| did save Apple was bringing Steve Jobs back, who immediately
| did the only thing he could. In a stroke of sheer genius
| (and/or luck), he wrangled a huge investment out of... Bill
| Gates, who was probably the name most associated with PC
| compatibles!
|
| The Vector story has none of these attributes, except for the
| nearly (or completely) going out of business part.
| pavlov wrote:
| Based on this article, Lore Harp of Vector doesn't seem so
| different from Steve Jobs. She also prioritized design and
| ease-of-use. She also was an industry outsider with enough
| charisma to reach national magazine covers.
|
| It's not like Jobs invented GUIs himself -- he happened to
| be in the right place to learn about all the work already
| done at Xerox and bring it home. If things had been
| slightly different, maybe it would have been Lore Harp who
| went to PARC instead.
|
| The personality cult around famous founders is 99%
| selection bias. Sure, they were talented. So were hundreds
| or thousands of others in the same industry.
| jhgb wrote:
| > and insisted on staying away from producing IBM compatibles
|
| That didn't turn out well for them in the end since they
| eventually had to build machines 90% similar to IBM PCs that
| were still able to run Windows in a VM, just so they wouldn't
| become obsolete after the G5 fiasco.
|
| So I'm not sure how you can conclusively claim that "it
| worked out for Apple".
| jhgb wrote:
| So it's actually "How two bored 1970s housewives had no impact
| on the PC industry"? Because the decision to not build an IBM
| PC clone meant that IBM PC won, and the alternative decision to
| build an IBM PC clone would have meant that IBM PC clone would
| have also won? The only difference seems to be the fate of this
| particular company, not the PC industry.
| hasmanean wrote:
| If they sold the stock, it would just be passing the loss onto
| the new buyers. In the grand scheme of things it would not
| reduce the net amount of suffering, but only transfer it to
| someone else.
| pavlov wrote:
| It's not the same. The seller in this case is someone who
| worked for the company for years and received the shares as
| compensation. The buyer is probably a fund or a speculator.
|
| Startup employees should never feel bad about selling their
| stock. The opportunity is rare enough.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| Agreed. Many "obvious" things are only obvious in
| hindsight.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| > Once Bob learned about this soon to be released IBM PC he
| requested and begged the company to start making IBM PC clones
| and accessories. He said the company had a year left unless it
| started embracing the PC
|
| > The now soon to be ex wife rejected this idea and kept the
| company running the same as always. She also fired her soon to
| be ex-husband.
|
| How do you look at the technical person putting it together and
| just disregard everything they are saying? When my non-
| technical persons bring forward a good idea or a good
| suggestion, we tend to weigh it versus previous ideas and
| market outlook...
| soperj wrote:
| >How do you look at the technical person putting it together
| and just disregard everything they are saying?
|
| Sounds like a large number of executives to me, honestly.
| tromp wrote:
| > Vector's board convinced Lore to return as president and CEO.
| She began commuting over with an 800-mile round trip every day
| from her home in San Francisco.
|
| How is that even possible? Two flights every day?
| bityard wrote:
| Back then, there was no TSA screening process that took 1-2
| hours of waiting in line, planes were smaller, airports were
| less busy, flights left on time whether they were full or not,
| and you could smoke on the plane.
|
| It would have been pretty expensive unless she or the company
| negotiated some kind of discount with the airline but lots of
| people today quite regularly commute 2 hours or more one-way in
| their car or on the train, so...
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Oh my god I completely forgot about stuff like the NY - DC
| shuttle. You could show up at LGA, walk up to the counter and
| buy a ticket for a flight that ran once an hour and be in the
| air literally within minutes.
|
| The last time I remember it being that easy was probably
| 9/13/2001. An ex-girlfriend was trying to get to DC from MSP
| because her father worked in the Pentagon and she hadn't
| heard from him. She called me from the airport in a panic at
| 2AM asking for help because her credit card was declined. I
| drove to the airport, groggily handed the ticket agent my
| card and drove back home. She was probably on the plane
| before I got home.
|
| Then a few weeks later came all the TSA crap...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Airline flights for the day are a frequent part of my book [1]
| which takes place in roughly the same time frame and geography.
| It wasn't really 400 air miles from LA to SF, but chalk that up
| to hyperbole. I used to leave the house in Hawthorne at 7:15
| for an 8:00 flight from LAX, believe it or not.
|
| The other poster mentions that you could smoke on the plane (in
| the back rows) and that was true, disgustingly enough.
|
| [1] https://www.albertcory.io
| dhosek wrote:
| I remember getting stuck in the smoking section once or twice
| in the bad old days. I begged the flight attendants to find
| someone who would switch seats with me.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Even sitting in the back of the NON-smoking section was
| bad, because you were still close to the smokers.
|
| And let's not even talk about the departure lounges in the
| airports.
| adventured wrote:
| Joe Biden did a three hour Amtrak trip (90 minutes each way)
| almost daily for 36 years for example.
|
| "Biden's apparently traveled over 2 million miles, the
| equivalent of four years of his life, on Amtrak."
|
| https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a32363173/joe-biden-amt...
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| That's only a third of the 800 mile commute.
| adventured wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're getting at. The distance by itself
| isn't particularly meaningful, the speed traveled +
| distance is.
|
| Amtrak is quite slow. Jetliners are ~4-8x faster.
| redm wrote:
| This was a fun read and a great story.
|
| I'm sure this will get downvoted since its not PC (pun intended),
| but I feel like the title should read "Two Bored 1970's
| Housewives, and an engineer Husband, Helped Create the PC
| Industry." The wives had the time and desire, and the husband had
| the skill and idea[1], just not the time or risk tolerance. I
| don't see how these can be separated, considering he was the
| Chief Engineer and created most of the products too. [2]
|
| [1] "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".
|
| [2] "Losing the engineer who had designed almost all of its
| hardware products since 1976 was a huge blow for Vector."
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| You don't understand the purpose and value of headlines. "An
| engineer husband" is not essential to hook readers into the
| story. His contribution wasn't ignored in the actual article.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| They understand the value to the reader, just not the value
| to the marketer. It's a pity the two interests aren't better
| aligned in this case.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Right. But the article isn't titled: How Two Bored 1970s
| Housewives Created the PC Industry
|
| It is an article that shows how two bored 1970's housewives
| helped to create the pc industry. It's a bit of a clickbait
| title but it's accurate.
| Goronmon wrote:
| _I don 't see how these can be separated, considering he was
| the Chief Engineer and created most of the products too. [2]_
|
| It's pretty easy to separate them. You just write an article
| about one part of the story. Not every article or story on a
| subject is required to be 100% comprehensive.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Well if the writing intentionally leaves out salient facts to
| shape a very specific and potentially misleading narrative,
| we call that propaganda.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| Bob Harp is featured in the article prominently, so I'm not
| sure how it can be "potentially misleading" as to his role.
|
| The whole point of this article is to highlight what was
| different about this situation. Bob Harp's contribution
| wasn't particularly unique! There were lots of highly
| competent engineers in the early PC industry doing stuff
| like this. Read Stan Veit's book or "Fire in the Valley" if
| you want more than you'll ever need to know about them.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| Many people helped create the industry. This article focused on
| two of them.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| Bob looks to be a more important part of the story than
| Carole. He is certainly mentioned more often and his
| contributions are more clearly defined.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| In those days, you could throw a rock in a random direction
| and hit a talented engineer.
|
| Still can, really.
|
| Management talent, not so much.
| chitowneats wrote:
| And why do you think that is the case? Clickbait, pure and
| simple.
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| _> She found her talents wasting while her kids spent their days
| in class and her husband did the 9-to-5 at Hughes._
|
| Back then they did not know that moms are heroes and being a mom
| is a full-time job.
| riedel wrote:
| Bored heroes might still be bored. It is all about choice and
| it is OK to chose not to be a heroes. We do not need to glorify
| that individual choice I guess, but make sure that there are
| choices. (Me and my wife are happy that those choices existed
| for us and my daughter has happy and fulfilled parents even if
| they are no heroes)
| kleiba wrote:
| My wife would _prefer_ to focus on being a mom but feels too
| pressured from outside into having a job. Also, it 's hard to
| afford a house these days with one income alone.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| My wife is getting pressure to home school our kids. Peer
| pressure sucks. I hope you get through it.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I mean, they did, and that's a large part of the early feminist
| movement, getting that recognized?
|
| As well as the important truth that not woman is suited to,
| likes, or wants to do 100% of the time.
| merliossu wrote:
| they still dont know. the narrative pushed by most of the woke
| people is that it is slavery and demeaning to raise your
| children and that women would rather make powerpoints for some
| random white dude paid 40-70k$/year than be enslaved to raising
| children
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _the narrative pushed by most of the woke people is that it
| is slavery and demeaning to raise your children and that
| women would rather make powerpoints for some random white
| dude paid 40-70k$ /year than be enslaved to raising children_
|
| I was about to respond with a snarky-yet-witty comment
| refuting this, but then probably both of us would be running
| afoul of HN guidelines.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >> the narrative pushed by most of the woke people is that
| it is slavery and demeaning to raise your children and that
| women would rather make powerpoints for some random white
| dude paid 40-70k$/year than be enslaved to raising children
|
| Why is this comment running afoul of HN guidelines?
|
| FWIW, I've heard this exact narrative expressed strongly by
| certain Feminists. (Note: not all feminists are the same;
| "woke" is a derogatory term that I do not assign to
| "feminists")
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The difference is payment of time in care work, and not just
| for childcare but also for other forms of care (disabled,
| elderly).
|
| Another very big issue is poverty. Time used for raising
| children doesn't count into pension payments, meaning that
| women who divorce from their husbands end up without anything
| in their name in the worst case.
| monoideism wrote:
| This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally
| found among the poor, just among middle class and up women
| (and men), typically left-leaning.
|
| Most poor mothers I've know would love to be stay-at-home
| moms because they're only working to survive and not for
| personal fulfillment, and because they love their kids.
| sharikone wrote:
| You claim correlation but that's not causation.
|
| My guess is that more educated women are less willing to
| be stay at home moms and that correlates with your
| demographics. When you have a degree and dreams of a
| career, giving up on them is harder.
|
| Also, the stigma against stay at home moms is nothing,
| nothing, compared to stay at home dads.
| monoideism wrote:
| > My guess is that more educated women are less willing
| to be stay at home moms and that correlates with your
| demographics. When you have a degree and dreams of a
| career, giving up on them is harder.
|
| That was pretty much my point.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > This attitude toward stay-at-home moms is not generally
| found among the poor
|
| Any women's shelter will disagree with you here. The rate
| of women that go back to abusive partnerships is
| immensely high among those who don't have any other
| option to survive.
| monoideism wrote:
| I didn't downvote, but what does this have to do with
| what I wrote?
| klyrs wrote:
| Stay-at-home parenting being unpaid work is not an
| "attitude," it's a fact of life. The leverage that
| abusive wage-earners have over their "non-employed"
| coparent is pretty strongly tied to their respective
| affluence. This isn't a "left leaning" problem. It's a
| problem of poverty, lack of education, and a lack of
| society's willingness to pay parents to stay home and
| work there.
|
| I'm pretty sure that infrastructure to pay parents to
| stay home counts as "socialism" which is vilified by the
| right.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Different family configurations appeared in many
| societies throughout history. The nuclear family is
| encouraged by capitalist states because one parent (the
| mother) staying home allows maximum flexibility for the
| male to be at work making money for the bosses.
| Importantly, the work the stay-at-home parent does is
| free, meaning the ruling class can pay them as little as
| possible. Nuclear families take up more real estate too,
| earning more money for banks and landlords.
|
| The liberal feminist movement in the 1970s changed this
| equation somewhat. Now two parents work constantly, can
| barely afford their lifestyle and no one cares for the
| kids (or the latent gender role of the mother requires
| her to effectively work two jobs at full capacity)! The
| ruling class again wins at (again) the expense of the
| future as the family configuration has become
| biologically insufficient to reproduce. The additional
| workers contributed by women also makes the labor market
| more flexible for employers, another win.
|
| Basically, we should ALL be doing less work and getting
| more services. Some poorer people are again looking at
| alternative family configurations because the nuclear
| model isn't sufficient to sustain life under these
| conditions.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Many middle class women and up also do housekeeping and
| care work. People are just different, and not everyone
| finds fulfillment in working outside the home. In fact
| with the pandemic making it so much easier to work while
| staying at home, some of these women might choose to find
| such work.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| My wife worked for several years. She stopped working
| when we had our 4th and child care was too expensive.
|
| Now that she is a stay-at-home mom, our quality of life
| has improved a lot. She has more energy in the evening to
| read with our kids, she follows up with friends and we
| are both more social, she makes better food than either
| of us could do before.
|
| Having a stay-at-home parent is DEFINITELY a luxury and a
| good decision IF you can afford it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The thing is, for those parents who can afford one parent
| to stay home, in 99% of cases it's the mothers who end up
| as stay-at-home parents, and their careers (and with it,
| their post-childraising perspectives) go down the drain.
|
| The current world abuses schools as whole day care
| institutions so that both parents can be exploited and
| worked to the ground, and when parents and children are
| home they are so tired they lack the energy to do
| anything meaningful besides eating some kind of processed
| food, play a round of video games, and go to bed.
|
| In an ideal world, a full working week with a living wage
| would have 20 hours so that _both_ parents can work four
| hours a day and then enjoy life with their children in
| the afternoon.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| To be fair, motherhood is a critical job and it's definitely in
| our interest as a society to give it a higher status than it
| has.
| api wrote:
| Same with teachers. The people who raise the next generation
| have absurdly low recognition and status in our culture.
| newsbinator wrote:
| Teachers would have more recognition and status if there
| were concrete evidence that their methods are effective and
| based on reproducible research.
|
| Is there a 10x teacher or even a 2x teacher? Surely there
| is, but how would we know?
|
| In Asian cultures a handful of teachers make a million
| dollars a year because they do test prep: it's easy to tell
| when their students pass or fail the big test. The most
| successful ones are treated by parents and test-takers as
| A-list celebrities, or even beyond that. They'd sooner
| swoon meeting Gwen Lee than Scarlett Johansson.
|
| But if you're teaching something harder to gauge, like
| "writing" or physical education, then it's hard to know if
| you're a 2x teacher or a 0.5x teacher. And you can't point
| to your research-backed methodology, because everybody
| else's methodology is also research-backed (n=22, observed
| over 3~6 weeks, as usual).
|
| The people who raise the next generation should have
| recognition and status if they're doing a good job. Are
| they? Would any random person off the street be doing an
| equally good job? We don't really know.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| > it's hard to know if you're a 2x teacher or a 0.5x
| teacher.
|
| Their students know. Even if it's a noisy metric, over
| the course of a few years a teacher will have 100+
| students.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I agree with you, but shall we change that to "parenthood"?
| Since we might as well push back against the stigma against
| the father being the one who raises the children instead of
| pursuing a career.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| As someone who quit my job (back in Feb 2020, of all
| times...) to spend more time with my then-unborn daughter,
| I agree with you 100%.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| As a stay-at-home homeschooling father, I experienced that
| stigma very briefly a decade ago, but it seemed to die a
| sudden death shortly after 2010. I've felt nothing but
| encouraged since. I think it's something that you'd expect
| from the outside, but doesn't really show up in practice.
| minikites wrote:
| As a society, we could recognize the status with money in the
| form of childcare grants and food assistance to parents, or
| by raising wages so both parents don't have to work, but
| neither of those is in the interest of the capital class, so
| we don't.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > they did not know that moms are heroes and being a mom is a
| full-time job
|
| My experience is that being a full time mum is valued less now.
| [deleted]
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| There are a lot more stories like this that would be great to
| unearth, rather than continuing to focus on the Jobs/Wozniak
| story. Much as I did love my ][!
| franhield wrote:
| Great read; we can say that imagination is the limit for a
| skilled programmer--great idea combined with skill results in a
| good outcome.
| severak_cz wrote:
| I hope some of the retrotech youtubers create showdown of Vector
| computer (or S-100 based machine in general). There seems to be
| one demo[0], "vector graphics" is too generic search term.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EXN6j0TZv4
| megamix wrote:
| I love housewives
| brunovianna wrote:
| it sounds just like the plot to halt and catch fire
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
| wumms wrote:
| You're right: "In the first season of the TV series, Halt and
| Catch Fire, a fictional drama depicting the birth of the
| personal computer industry in the 1980s, the pivot of company
| Cardiff Electric resembles both the history of Corona Data
| Systems and Compaq." [0]
|
| (Corona Data Systems was co-founded by Robert Harp)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems
| vimy wrote:
| I really hope Apple will make a folklore.org show in the style
| of Halt and Catch Fire.
| guerrilla wrote:
| It's been done though with HCF, why would anyone but
| superfans want to see the same thing again?
| Kye wrote:
| It's not unusual for there to be many fictional treatments
| of the same history/source material.
| apetresc wrote:
| Sure, but when it's the fourth or fifth treatment about
| the relatively recent founding of a single company that
| is still dominant in the present day, and that treatment
| is sponsored _by_ the company in question, it comes off
| as self-serving.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I'd love to see a dramatization of the making of the
| Macintosh. I read _Revolution In The Valley_ not too long
| ago and it 's fascinating to read about the personalities
| of the people who created that machine. I think it would be
| a nice compliment to _Halt and Catch Fire_ --a Mac version
| to their PC-Compatible show.
| vimy wrote:
| Exactly this. I would love to see the Japanese Sony
| engineer hiding in the closet from Steve Jobs.
| bitwize wrote:
| I've been hoping for a Silicon Valley style dramedy series
| about the early days of open source. My headcasting for this
| has Donal Logue as Richard Stallman, Nick Offerman as Eric
| Raymond, and Cory Michael Smith as Linus.
| shusaku wrote:
| > Lore and Carole's emphasis on visual aesthetics led them to
| offer this choice of colors at a time when many companies gave
| little thought to what their computers looked like
|
| Looking at their designs in the article, they just ooze cool.
| thoughtsimple wrote:
| My favorite is the 8k static memory board. It has 64 RAM chips
| which means each one comes in at a whopping 128 bytes or 1k
| bits.
| amwelles wrote:
| Why can't this headline say "two women?" Big yuck.
| 55555 wrote:
| women = adult females
|
| bored 1970s housewives = bored adult females in the 1970s who
| have forgone a professional occupation to be a homemaker
|
| They used the latter because it's far more descriptive, and
| these facts are relevant to the article.
| astura wrote:
| The title is literal, according to TFA the reason they started
| the company because they were bored with being housewives.
|
| >"I cannot stand being at home," said Lore in a 1983 New York
| Times article. "It drives me insane. Everybody thought I was
| strange because I would not go to the bridge club or have my
| fingernails done."
|
| >Lore Harp met a kindred spirit in the form of a neighbor,
| Carole Ely, whose kids shared classes with the Harp children.
| Like Lore, she found the life of a homemaker wanting. "We were
| bored doing the housewife thing," recalls Ely today. "I was
| ready to be something." Just a few years prior, Ely had worked
| for large investment firms such as Merrill Lynch on the east
| coast, and she was itching to get back to business.
| fghfghfghfghfgh wrote:
| Because the word "housewife" invokes a fuller mental image of
| what general boring conditions those two women might be living
| under?
| eplanit wrote:
| The same reason that the maker of the machine itself, the
| husband, isn't mentioned in the title -- doesn't fit the
| narrative. Who'd ever want to hear about a couple and a friend
| starting a company? "Two Women" will get more attention, and
| therefore sell more ads, which is the reason that the
| publication exists.
| johnp271 wrote:
| Because the objective of a 'headline' is to get people to
| continue reading, essentially it's clickbait. Which descriptive
| choice gets more notice and is more likely to provoke continued
| reading "two women" or "Two Bored...Housewives"?
| Bigpet wrote:
| I too get offended when salient information to the story is
| part of the headline.
|
| I never want to read "Motorist kills 2 pedestrians", or
| "Policeofficer accused of planting evidence". It has to be
| "Person killed 2 other people" and "person accused of planting
| evidence" otherwise I am personally offended.
|
| Bigger yuck.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| Anyone else remember when journalists were on some strange
| anti-SUV crusade. "SUV crashes into pedestrians", "SUV runs
| off bridge", "5 killed by SUV". The titles really read like
| SUVs had been co-opted by Skynet and were causing all sorts
| of mayhem.
| johnx123-up wrote:
| FWIW... related article: The Rise and Decline of Vector Graphic :
| Management Mistakes and IBM Crush Couple's Computer Venture
| (1985) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
| xpm-1985-08-20-fi-2173-s...
| nikkinana wrote:
| Stick to porn
| khazhoux wrote:
| > "We were bored doing the housewife thing," recalls Ely today.
| "I was ready to be something."
|
| I find it interesting how it's generally acceptable for women to
| insult other women who choose to devote their time to raising a
| family. I mean, I get her point but the quote above is demeaning
| as hell.
|
| Since that's not likely to end anytime soon, I suppose it'd be
| funny to see the insults fly in the other direction. Like,
| stating how "working moms" are kidding themselves that they have
| a full mother-child relationship. They've out-sourced a critical
| and singular relationship to paid employees (the nanny --
| assuming their spouse also works). They don't know what's going
| on in their kids' lives, they don't know who in school is
| bullying them, they don't know which kids are getting into drugs,
| they only know the very surface of what their kids are dealing
| with. They're lying to themselves to think they can both kick ass
| at work and as a parent. They sacrificed precious childhood years
| of emotional, mental, and life guidance, in exchange for their
| paycheck.
|
| None of the above is cool to say. But it's definitely OK to
| demean in the other direction.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm a male parent, working full-time, wife quit her
| job when kids were born. She has never regretted the decision,
| and is always super busy and never "bored." And me, I know 100%
| there's an experience I've sadly forever missed of spending time
| with my kids, especially pre-WFH.
| astura wrote:
| Working moms get those comments everyday, so I don't really get
| your point.
| khazhoux wrote:
| I suppose it's that deriding stay-at-home parents is commonly
| and socially acceptable (in media, articles like this, etc),
| more so than in the other direction. I can't think of an
| example, e.g. in media or press, where the working mother is
| ridiculed.
|
| But anyway, it's a matter of perspective, I suppose, and
| which social bubble one inevitably inhabits.
| exolymph wrote:
| I see all of your anti-working-mom points regularly. It's a
| matter of your social info bubble.
| khazhoux wrote:
| In general I agree, but I think only the one viewpoint is
| commonly acceptable today in media and with thought leaders.
| Maybe that's my bubble talking.
| balb0a wrote:
| "We were bored doing the housewife thing," recalls Ely today.
| "I was ready to be something."
|
| Sounds like the approach Edward Bernays would take
| khazhoux wrote:
| I don't get the reference. Is Edward Bernays well-known?
| balb0a wrote:
| I would say very well known in the propaganda scene. You
| can check this "piano" article, I think it nicely shows the
| idea behind: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/edward-bernays-
| how-america-bo...
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