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Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

The untold story of Lore Harp McGovern

The Harp house was soon filled with pamphlets, newsletters, and how-to guides about microcomputers, and Bob discovered, to his delight, that the Altair’s creator Ed Roberts had built it around a principle of “open architecture” via its S-100 expansion socket. The hobbyist market was still the primary driver for sales of first-generation computers like the Altair, but small-to-medium-sized businesses were becoming interested in owning a microcomputer to use for word processing, accounting, and other business-related tasks. “I sent a nice note back,” Harp remembered later, “and said I especially enjoyed the comment about this bitch running the company because that poor guy is either so jealous or he’s so stupid that he doesn’t have anything else to talk about, and I must be terribly important in his eyes.”

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