Artifact Details

Title

McGovern, Lore Harp oral history

Catalog Number

102717250

Type

Moving image

Description

Lore McGovern grew up in Germany in the post WWII era. She first came to the US (northern California) on a foreign exchange program in the mid-sixties as a 20 year-old. She worked odd jobs and traveled for a period of time before she met Bob Harp and moved to Southern California, where they were eventually married. Bob was a professor at Caltech, so Lore went back to college and got a degree in Anthropology.

In the early 1970’s, Bob took a job at Hughes Research, quite some distance from Los Angeles and its related urban stimulations. Feeling bored, she teamed up with another woman who was equally bored, to start a company. At first, they considered going into the travel business, but after deciding that wasn’t going to work, they eventually decided to go into the add-on board business for the nascent personal computer business. Bob Harp was a tinkerer and had designed a memory board for the new generation of hobby computers. The two women decided to turn that into a real product.

First working out of their home, and then nearby leased space, Bob continued to design new boards – and eventually complete computers. They built their company, Vector Graphic, into a wildly successful corporation – going public in 1981. The company’s success was not long lived, as they were slow to move to the IBM PC standard. She eventually left the company and it was sold. Following that experience, she was involved in a number of other startup opportunities as well as philanthropy, along with her second husband, Pat McGovern, founder of IDG, International Data Group.

Date

2016-11-03

Participants

Hendrie, Gardner, Interviewer

McGovern, Lore Harp, Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Hillsborough, CA, USA

Format

MOV

Subject

S-100; Altair; McGovern, PAt; IDG; Computer World; Info World; Vector Graphic

Credit