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.
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 moniker 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.
For its part, Vector Graphic went on to become one of the best known PC makers of the late 1970s. Like Apple, it was one of the first computer companies to go public, and like Apple, it set its products apart from the crowd with its attention to industrial design.
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.
“I CANNOT STAND BEING AT HOME”
Traditionally, people move to the suburbs specifically to avoid novelty. And yet, in 1970s California, suburbia often served as a crucible for entrepreneurial risk-taking.
Many know the story of how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak launched Apple with a foothold in the Jobs family garage in suburban Los Altos, California. Around that same time, about 350 miles south, a spirit of entrepreneurship similarly captivated an entire Westlake Village household. In fact, it pulled in the neighbors, too.
The Harps, who moved into the area in the early 1970s, were a typical suburban family: a father that worked in an office all day, a stay-at-home mom, and two elementary-school-aged girls. That father, Dr. Robert Harp, spent his days as a senior scientist for Hughes Research Labs in Malibu, and his wife, a recent German immigrant named Lore, kept house.
When Lore Lange-Hegermann first visited California in 1966, on a solo trip at the age of 20, she discovered an energizing atmosphere of freedom from parental meddling and a general sense that anything was possible. “I felt as though I was cutting the umbilical cord for the second time,” she recalls.
Against the wishes of her parents, Lore decided to remain in the States. She picked up odd jobs until she met Bob Harp, who worked as a member of the faculty at Cal Tech. The two got married and had two daughters, and Lore earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Cal State, Los Angeles.
By 1975, Lore began to feel antsy. She found her talents wasting while her kids spent their days in class and her husband did the 9-to-5 at Hughes. Against this, as with her parents, she rebelled. ”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.
Together, the pair of bored housewives decided they needed something more productive to do. They began to explore ideas for starting a new business. Drawing from their shared love of travel, they first considered starting a travel agency, but the licenses required to operate one proved too burdensome and the possibility of profits too slim.
Then a uniquely 1970s opportunity popped up. During an era when the typical small computer came in a refrigerator-sized chassis and cost tens of thousands of dollars, an Albuquerque engineer named Ed Roberts took advantage of the incredibly-shrinking microprocessor to create a computer that hobbyists could build themselves from a kit.
That machine, the Altair 8800, debuted on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which reached a wide audience of technically-minded people. Roberts’s company, MITS, became the pioneering firm of the personal computer revolution.
One of the many electronics buffs who saw that article-and placed an order for an Altair kit-was Bob Harp. When it arrived, he found its memory board poorly designed. Instead of returning the kit, Bob reacted like most engineers of the time: he created his own memory board to replace it.
As a kid, Bob began experimenting with electronics when his family moved to a farm without electricity. He sought to build his own battery-powered crystal radios so he could pick up the radio shows he had grown fond of at his old house. It was frustrating, but the quest ignited a love of science which led him to acquire degrees in physics from Stanford and MIT.
Bob’s first computer electronics project emerged from the Altair in the form of that 8K static memory board. It plugged into the Altair’s 100-pin expansion bus, which the industry later dubbed S-100 in a nod to vendor neutrality. That bus became the basis of the first personal computer hardware standard-one that typically ran Digital Research’s CP/M operating system. A rich industry sprouted around this fertile oasis, with multiple companies providing plug-in CPU, memory, video, and other peripheral cards for S-100-based systems. Meanwhile, other firms specialized in the software necessary to make those systems useful-including an outfit known at first as Micro-soft, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
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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 moniker 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.
For its part, Vector Graphic went on to become one of the best known PC makers of the late 1970s. Like Apple, it was one of the first computer companies to go public, and like Apple, it set its products apart from the crowd with its attention to industrial design.
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.
“I CANNOT STAND BEING AT HOME”
Traditionally, people move to the suburbs specifically to avoid novelty. And yet, in 1970s California, suburbia often served as a crucible for entrepreneurial risk-taking.
Many know the story of how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak launched Apple with a foothold in the Jobs family garage in suburban Los Altos, California. Around that same time, about 350 miles south, a spirit of entrepreneurship similarly captivated an entire Westlake Village household. In fact, it pulled in the neighbors, too.
The Harps, who moved into the area in the early 1970s, were a typical suburban family: a father that worked in an office all day, a stay-at-home mom, and two elementary-school-aged girls. That father, Dr. Robert Harp, spent his days as a senior scientist for Hughes Research Labs in Malibu, and his wife, a recent German immigrant named Lore, kept house.
When Lore Lange-Hegermann first visited California in 1966, on a solo trip at the age of 20, she discovered an energizing atmosphere of freedom from parental meddling and a general sense that anything was possible. “I felt as though I was cutting the umbilical cord for the second time,” she recalls.
Against the wishes of her parents, Lore decided to remain in the States. She picked up odd jobs until she met Bob Harp, who worked as a member of the faculty at Cal Tech. The two got married and had two daughters, and Lore earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Cal State, Los Angeles.
By 1975, Lore began to feel antsy. She found her talents wasting while her kids spent their days in class and her husband did the 9-to-5 at Hughes. Against this, as with her parents, she rebelled. ”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.
Together, the pair of bored housewives decided they needed something more productive to do. They began to explore ideas for starting a new business. Drawing from their shared love of travel, they first considered starting a travel agency, but the licenses required to operate one proved too burdensome and the possibility of profits too slim.
Then a uniquely 1970s opportunity popped up. During an era when the typical small computer came in a refrigerator-sized chassis and cost tens of thousands of dollars, an Albuquerque engineer named Ed Roberts took advantage of the incredibly-shrinking microprocessor to create a computer that hobbyists could build themselves from a kit.
That machine, the Altair 8800, debuted on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which reached a wide audience of technically-minded people. Roberts’s company, MITS, became the pioneering firm of the personal computer revolution.
One of the many electronics buffs who saw that article-and placed an order for an Altair kit-was Bob Harp. When it arrived, he found its memory board poorly designed. Instead of returning the kit, Bob reacted like most engineers of the time: he created his own memory board to replace it.
As a kid, Bob began experimenting with electronics when his family moved to a farm without electricity. He sought to build his own battery-powered crystal radios so he could pick up the radio shows he had grown fond of at his old house. It was frustrating, but the quest ignited a love of science which led him to acquire degrees in physics from Stanford and MIT.
Bob’s first computer electronics project emerged from the Altair in the form of that 8K static memory board. It plugged into the Altair’s 100-pin expansion bus, which the industry later dubbed S-100 in a nod to vendor neutrality. That bus became the basis of the first personal computer hardware standard-one that typically ran Digital Research’s CP/M operating system. A rich industry sprouted around this fertile oasis, with multiple companies providing plug-in CPU, memory, video, and other peripheral cards for S-100-based systems. Meanwhile, other firms specialized in the software necessary to make those systems useful-including an outfit known at first as Micro-soft, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
Read more...