Vector Graphic

~ the obituary ~

Two neighbors in Westlake Village decided in 1976 that they were bored and wanted to run a business. Lore Harp had an anthropology degree and two daughters; Carole Ely had traded bonds before she stopped working. They considered a travel agency and settled instead on selling an 8K memory board for the S-100 bus that Harp's husband Bob had designed for the Altair 8800 the previous year. They put in $6,000, incorporated Vector Graphic on 23 august 1976, and ran it out of a spare bedroom in Harp's house.

They sold the boards by mail order, cash on delivery, off advertisements in the computer magazines. When AMD quoted them too high for memory chips, Harp went and made a deal with Fairchild instead. First year sales came to about a million dollars. In 1977 they announced a whole computer at the West Coast Computer Faire, the Vector 1, a Z80 machine that arrived built rather than in a box of parts, and the company aimed it at businesses that had no intention of soldering anything.

What made Vector unusual was that somebody there thought about how the thing looked and how it was explained. Rounded corners and a choice of four colors, with the capacitors picked to match the color of the memory boards, and manuals a person could actually follow. The Vector 3 put the screen and the processor in one case with the keyboard attached, and the Memorite word processing software running on the built in Flashwriter video board turned it into a word processor at a fraction of what a dedicated word processing machine cost. Revenue reached $36.2 million by 1981. Harp took the company public in august 1981 and fought the underwriters to get stock into the hands of every employee.

This is a company that finished dying in 1987 in a country I have never lived in, selling machines through American computer stores to American small businesses. The part of it that traveled is not the hardware. It is the fact that the S-100 world of CP/M machines was still an open argument in 1980 about what a small computer should even be shaped like, and that argument was over before anything reached my house. What I got, years later and a long way east, was the settled answer: a PC clone, because IBM had won and everybody else in this story had already been buried.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

Nobody in the trade press could get past the fact that two housewives were running a computer company, and they said so in roughly those words every time. Harp was on the cover of Inc. in 1981 and got called the ice maiden for being difficult in negotiations, which is the kind of compliment that only ever goes one direction. The two of them had built the company on supplier relationships and on packaging and documentation that were better than what the engineering firms shipped, which was the actual competitive advantage and was almost never what got written about.

The machines themselves were odd in ways that mattered later. Vector used 100 track per inch floppy drives with hard sectored media, which is not what anybody else used, so disks did not travel between a Vector and anything else. That was normal for 1979 and fatal by 1983.

~ the slide ~

The IBM PC was announced in august 1981, at the top of Vector's run. Computerland had been one of Vector's main retail channels, and once Computerland had IBM machines on the shelf the Vector sales through that channel fell far enough that Vector ended the relationship. Ending your own distribution because the store now stocks a better selling competitor is not a strategy, it is a symptom.

Then in april 1982 somebody let the Vector 4 out early, six months before it shipped. Customers stopped buying the Vector 3 and waited. The same month, Bob Harp left after a fight with Lore over control of the company, and the two of them divorced that year. Lore stepped down as CEO at the end of 1982, sold out and left entirely by 1984, and the venture investors took the wheel.

~ what really happened ~

The Vector 4 was built as a hybrid 8 bit and 16 bit machine running CP/M, which was a bet that CP/M would stay the standard operating system for business computers. IBM went with DOS. Management knew at the time that they were gambling on it and said so. They lost, and after that there was no version of the product line that could be sold to anybody.

By summer 1985 the headcount was down to about three dozen from 425 three years earlier. Chapter 11 came in december 1985, no merger partner could be found, and the Chapter 7 liquidation of what remained closed in october 1987. The headquarters and assembly building next to the 101 freeway was turned into a Home Depot. The 17 person company across the street from it was Amgen.

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