Wang Labs seems to be getting a lot of attention these days. I’m guessing it was one of the following too videos highlighting the company that surfaced this? (Both videos are great if you’ve not seen them).
The second video is from Usagi Electric. He did a recent colab with Veritasium on lightbulbs (vacuum tubes). His videos are awesome and he has several different cool projects running.
1. 1-bit Vacuum tube computer
2. Centurion Mini computer (whole series, amazing)
I came here to post the link from Asianometry (one of my fav YT channels), but you beat me to it. I also want to point out that Wang Senior reminds me of Marcus Aurelius. Both were very smart and showed a lot of wisdom. Very accomplished individuals. But both made the same mistake. They thought that their offspring would be as affective as them? Or maybe that their offspring, even with their flaws, deserved to own the things that they built?
In both cases their is a lesson for the rest of us. Do not assume your children will be good stewards of our creations or that they are as good (in the things we built and want to give to them) as we were. I do not know the solution here. Maybe sell said creation and give them the cash. Or give it to the family, assuming you built a family. I point to the Ford family here. They have been good stewards to the car company. Many might not agree, but whenever the Ford company goes into deep trouble (maybe due to the family itself) but the family does come together and do the right things to save the company.
My father worked for Wang in the UK for a short while, before setting up as an independent software developer and reseller of Wang 2200 systems some time in the early 70s. As a small boy I played in the washing-machine-sized boxes that they came in, and even played a few Trek and Adventure style games on the machines. I also learned to write on the back of that green-striped fanfold printer paper so I guess I inhaled various program listings in Basic subconsciously! I got kind of tired of "Wang, hur hur" jokes in the playground though.
The software my Dad sold was mostly small payroll and similar systems customised for small businesses. To my recollection there was a manufacturer of industrial tubing, an accountancy firm, a members club, a precious metals dealer, and stationers. So these little systems definitely got around. I don't think most of them used the word processing capabilities as the dot-matrix printer output available wouldn't have looked professional enough; I guess there might have been some golf-ball or daisy wheel options, but I don't recall seeing them.
Wang did launch a small PC (their "Professional Computer" rather than "Personal Computer") but it was MS-DOS compatible, rather than being an IBM PC clone per se, and I don't think it was very successful - and Wang went bust, so it clearly wasn't enough anyway. I know it ran AutoCAD at least, as I remember demo-ing it to a customer for my Dad. The customer is still around and remembers this, although alas my Dad died a few years back.
Once it was clear that the IBM PC compatible was the way of the future, he migrated most of his customers onto a compatible Basic system (Niakwa Basic) rather than completely re-writing the software. As he approached retirement age they either moved on to shrink-wrapped options (probably spreadsheets for some of the simpler ones), or in one or two cases had the systems rewritten in Visual Basic. I tried to help out with that once, but even with a background of writing stuff in Sinclair Basic, the Wang Basic 2C was pretty oddball, and the only documentation for my Dad's stuff was in his head, so I wasn't much use.
Anyway, that's a long way of saying that I have a lot of nostalgia for these briefly successful small mini-computers. The PC compatible beat them fair and square, but they were pretty nice machines in their day.
> To my recollection there was a manufacturer of industrial tubing, an accountancy firm, a members club, a precious metals dealer, and stationers.
It wasn't Wang, but this was my heyday during the 90's. Accounting/Distribution systems for small to medium sized companies. Post Production House, Tire Distribution, Auto parts Distribution, General Warehousing, Meat broker, Magazine Distribution, a Seminary, Wholesale Nursery, a Hotel/Casino.
Everyone needs accounting, and you get a taste of all of these businesses and how they work, especially if you're doing distribution. It was really interesting. Accounting consists of the core modules: General Ledger (your checkbook), Account Payable (your bills), Accounts Receivable (what people owe you). GL/AP/AR. The Casino was very interesting because they don't have an Accounts Receivable, they don't invoice anyone. People just walk in and give them money!
It was the height of the mini computing market, so we were installing systems on everything. HP, DG, Sun, Sequent, PCs, etc. Was a grand time.
> you get a taste of all of these businesses and how they work, especially if you're doing distribution. It was really interesting
This is one of the things I really enjoy in inter prose sales: I get to meet customers who are really smart and deeply domain-knowledgeable about some domain I barely know anything about. (Calls to mind Blake’s comment that one can “See a world in a grain of sand”).
Of course some customers, or at least the representatives one meets on a sales call, are numbskulls, but in general this isn’t the case.
Personal story: in about 1988 (I think) I made a business trip to Lowell to visit Wang, on behalf of 3Com. I was the email guy, and Wang apparently was interested in working with 3+Mail. I don't think anything ever came of it, but memories fade...
I remember the cubicle walls were metal, not fabric. That's about the only memory that stuck with me. Other than: there were no hotels anywhere close to Boston because of DECWorld, and I had to stay in Seabrook, NH.
Oh, and I met an ex-nun who became a programmer. She said she was fascinated with "bits going down the wire." Me, too.
When in the regular computer world line editors were still the norm Wang's were like word processors (not surprising, they made some pretty good and reliable office automation equipment). I had some fun playing around with those in the mid 80's and they inspired me to write my own editor because I was really done with the keyhole view of programming.
That editor forced me to become a much better programmer and I used it professionally until the mid 90's when there were lots of alternatives. But I still have the muscle memory for that homebrew thing and every now and then it trips me up :)
Once upon a time, I was on the receiving end of an SEC audit which required our British subsidiary to send us their transaction log. They didn't have database records for that time period, it was all stored on the Wang which had long since been turned off and put away in a cabinet. They duly mailed us the Wang to extract the data from.
Except they mailed it in a box exactly the size of the external case, with no padding. And, at some point, someone had decided to upgrade the Wang's storage but didn't want to pay for the expensive proprietary hard drive rails, so they had just stacked a bare SCSI Quantum Fireball (full height, about 8 lb?) on top of some wooden spacers.
When I opened the case, there was a deep layer of metal dust and debris in the bottom tray and the motherboard was gleaming clean traces. The hard drive, bouncing around, had scraped off every chip from the motherboard.
I called a Wang expert to see if they could retrieve the data from the disk, and they quoted me $2000 an hour just to take a look with no guarantees. So I ended up reconstituting the data by having a small team type hundreds of thousands of transactions by hand from green-bar printouts that were discovered in the back of that closet in England, and then checking and cross-checking them twice before giving them to the SEC.
FUN TIMES. God bless Wang and proprietary hard drive rails in general.
It's good practice in finance to have monotonically increasing sequence numbers on transactions, date/timestamps, and also running totals. That way if any of those things doesn't match, repeats, or has a gap, then you know you're missing something and can flag it.
Worked in Wang UK VS OS tech support in the early '90s.
Best memories:
- Figuring out how to get square root in COBOL (no built-in fn).
- Writing Conway's game of life in Wang assembler (more or less IBM 270/370 assembler).
Worst memories:
Quality Learning Process (QLP) - a completely ineffectual attempt to turn the company around by writing "working together for quality" on mugs, pencils etc. (at least that's how I remember it).
19 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 16.3 ms ] thread>How many inches is the floppy on the small Wang?
Love it!
Background on Wang here: https://youtu.be/MgDZQy0nN-Y
And a short series of videos on bringing up a Wang Writer: https://youtu.be/QoEhyQ0SXUE
1. 1-bit Vacuum tube computer
2. Centurion Mini computer (whole series, amazing)
3. Wang Writer
4. PDP-11 (just started out)
5. Liton mini computer with drum memory
6. TI-99 computer
In both cases their is a lesson for the rest of us. Do not assume your children will be good stewards of our creations or that they are as good (in the things we built and want to give to them) as we were. I do not know the solution here. Maybe sell said creation and give them the cash. Or give it to the family, assuming you built a family. I point to the Ford family here. They have been good stewards to the car company. Many might not agree, but whenever the Ford company goes into deep trouble (maybe due to the family itself) but the family does come together and do the right things to save the company.
My father worked for Wang in the UK for a short while, before setting up as an independent software developer and reseller of Wang 2200 systems some time in the early 70s. As a small boy I played in the washing-machine-sized boxes that they came in, and even played a few Trek and Adventure style games on the machines. I also learned to write on the back of that green-striped fanfold printer paper so I guess I inhaled various program listings in Basic subconsciously! I got kind of tired of "Wang, hur hur" jokes in the playground though.
The software my Dad sold was mostly small payroll and similar systems customised for small businesses. To my recollection there was a manufacturer of industrial tubing, an accountancy firm, a members club, a precious metals dealer, and stationers. So these little systems definitely got around. I don't think most of them used the word processing capabilities as the dot-matrix printer output available wouldn't have looked professional enough; I guess there might have been some golf-ball or daisy wheel options, but I don't recall seeing them.
Wang did launch a small PC (their "Professional Computer" rather than "Personal Computer") but it was MS-DOS compatible, rather than being an IBM PC clone per se, and I don't think it was very successful - and Wang went bust, so it clearly wasn't enough anyway. I know it ran AutoCAD at least, as I remember demo-ing it to a customer for my Dad. The customer is still around and remembers this, although alas my Dad died a few years back.
Once it was clear that the IBM PC compatible was the way of the future, he migrated most of his customers onto a compatible Basic system (Niakwa Basic) rather than completely re-writing the software. As he approached retirement age they either moved on to shrink-wrapped options (probably spreadsheets for some of the simpler ones), or in one or two cases had the systems rewritten in Visual Basic. I tried to help out with that once, but even with a background of writing stuff in Sinclair Basic, the Wang Basic 2C was pretty oddball, and the only documentation for my Dad's stuff was in his head, so I wasn't much use.
Anyway, that's a long way of saying that I have a lot of nostalgia for these briefly successful small mini-computers. The PC compatible beat them fair and square, but they were pretty nice machines in their day.
It wasn't Wang, but this was my heyday during the 90's. Accounting/Distribution systems for small to medium sized companies. Post Production House, Tire Distribution, Auto parts Distribution, General Warehousing, Meat broker, Magazine Distribution, a Seminary, Wholesale Nursery, a Hotel/Casino.
Everyone needs accounting, and you get a taste of all of these businesses and how they work, especially if you're doing distribution. It was really interesting. Accounting consists of the core modules: General Ledger (your checkbook), Account Payable (your bills), Accounts Receivable (what people owe you). GL/AP/AR. The Casino was very interesting because they don't have an Accounts Receivable, they don't invoice anyone. People just walk in and give them money!
It was the height of the mini computing market, so we were installing systems on everything. HP, DG, Sun, Sequent, PCs, etc. Was a grand time.
This is one of the things I really enjoy in inter prose sales: I get to meet customers who are really smart and deeply domain-knowledgeable about some domain I barely know anything about. (Calls to mind Blake’s comment that one can “See a world in a grain of sand”).
Of course some customers, or at least the representatives one meets on a sales call, are numbskulls, but in general this isn’t the case.
I remember the cubicle walls were metal, not fabric. That's about the only memory that stuck with me. Other than: there were no hotels anywhere close to Boston because of DECWorld, and I had to stay in Seabrook, NH.
Oh, and I met an ex-nun who became a programmer. She said she was fascinated with "bits going down the wire." Me, too.
That editor forced me to become a much better programmer and I used it professionally until the mid 90's when there were lots of alternatives. But I still have the muscle memory for that homebrew thing and every now and then it trips me up :)
Except they mailed it in a box exactly the size of the external case, with no padding. And, at some point, someone had decided to upgrade the Wang's storage but didn't want to pay for the expensive proprietary hard drive rails, so they had just stacked a bare SCSI Quantum Fireball (full height, about 8 lb?) on top of some wooden spacers.
When I opened the case, there was a deep layer of metal dust and debris in the bottom tray and the motherboard was gleaming clean traces. The hard drive, bouncing around, had scraped off every chip from the motherboard.
I called a Wang expert to see if they could retrieve the data from the disk, and they quoted me $2000 an hour just to take a look with no guarantees. So I ended up reconstituting the data by having a small team type hundreds of thousands of transactions by hand from green-bar printouts that were discovered in the back of that closet in England, and then checking and cross-checking them twice before giving them to the SEC.
FUN TIMES. God bless Wang and proprietary hard drive rails in general.
Thanks for sharing!
btw: funny you can still buy those hard drives: https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-FB540S-FIREBALL-540MB-SCSI/dp...
Best memories:
- Figuring out how to get square root in COBOL (no built-in fn).
- Writing Conway's game of life in Wang assembler (more or less IBM 270/370 assembler).
Worst memories:
Quality Learning Process (QLP) - a completely ineffectual attempt to turn the company around by writing "working together for quality" on mugs, pencils etc. (at least that's how I remember it).
https://youtu.be/VtvjbmoDx-I