I worked for Wang Labs at corporate headquarters ("The Towers...") for 8 years, first as a product manager for several software communications products and then as part of the marketing team for the Americas/Asia/Pacific region (China, Aus, NZ, Latin America, Canada). I joined in 1984 when the company was on a growth tear, profitable, and almost 32,000 employees and about $3B in revenue (and note that $3B was worth a lot more back then); I stayed until 1992, when the company declared Chapter 11, revenue dropped to about $1B, and 20k employees were laid off. I learned a tremendous amount at the company, travelled extensively (25+ countries), and not once ever thought we would fail, in spite of profitability, revenue, and product issues toward the end. Comments below lay blame on both Dr. Wang and on Fred (which are valid: Fred was not ready to take over the company, other senior managers (Cunningham, for example) saw no future for themselves and left, and the Doctor was unable to see beyond the end of the VS and the mini-computer). However, remember that several other companies - many of them based in Massachusetts - were also laid low by the rise of the personal computer, including DEC, Prime, and Data General. I spent 40 years in the tech industry, the last 16 as a tech industry analyst (Gartner and a couple others). I have been with companies that have gone Chapter 11 (Wang), run out of cash and closed the doors, gone public, been acquired, or have gone through massive downsizing. Tech is not for the faint of heart, but I can honestly say in 40 years I was never once bored. For readers who are newer to the tech industry, let me leave you with a couple thoughts on why the lessons of the ancient past (in tech, 1982 is ancient history) are still relevant: .If you think what happened to Wang can't happen to you or your company, you are wrong. Change always happens, and in tech it happens fast. (social media companies, I am looking at you). .The future is rarely predictable. Hard to realize today, but the idea of replacing typewriters, paper, and administrative assistants with computers was once radical. .The tech industry is a roller coaster. To survive you need a strong stomach and a healthy amount of stamina. And luck is a large part of it, right next to innovation and hard work. Anyone who hits it big and tries to tell you they didn't get lucky is fooling themselves. Great story by Asianometry, thanks for making this happen.
Excellent commentary. You need luck. Until they started with advertising, Google had the best search engine but had no idea on how to profit from it. Which other companies you were? Best wishes.
It was 1978. My high school purchased a Wang computer. It had 8 KB RAM, 2 8" 128 KB floppy drives, a mark sense card reader, a dot matrix printer, an IBM selectric printer, a CRT screen and keyboard. We had a very forward thinking computer science teacher that convinced the school to dish out $25,000 for the system. I was one of the students that stayed after school to do programming on it.
I went to collage with his son, Fred. He had more powerful computers in his dorm room than the school's physical sciences departments had. Fred is a really great person. In fact, in 1968, we had some lab reports for Chem 3 (physical chemistry) that required lots of complicated scientific notation calculations including trig and log functions. Slide rules and CRC handbook tables were the only option because the computers and sophisticated calculators were not yet available to the students. But Fred had a high end scientific WANG calculator with two terminals (nixie tubes!) in his dorm room. He had a signup sheet so the rest of his classmates could get 15 minutes chunks of time on his calculator; and 15 minutes on his calculator saved a few hours of table/slip-stick work. If he were Steve Jobs, he would have probably charged for the time.
@@ByWire-yk8eh Man thats so cool, you have lived a really interesting life for sure. I just started studying computer engineering, so not quite the same, but still a bit similar :) Anyways, thank you for sharing :)
That’s awesome that he let that happen for free. That is a rare thing to see today. But it also shows that he wasn’t good at business unfortunately. I dont know the cost or discount that could be given but he could have let his father know that and donate some of them and had a building named after him. Setup a scholarship in his name to be remembered since his company isn’t. I think I remember the super bowl ad? But I don’t remember the company but I was pretty young during all this. I remember I went to a small private college for 2 years in the late 90’s and the next year everyone was getting a free laptop. A man who owned a It company donated 1 million to the university and supplied the laptops. If memory serves the tuition went up $3000 the laptops were refurbished from his company and sold a new prices and marked up above a similar new computer. I heard now they give you an air book and phone with spywear on it to block or report unchristian things.
I started my professional programming career on Wang mini-computers. It was a much faster platform to program for than IBM systems at the time. Spent seven years on Wangs and watched them crash. I was fortunate to meet Dr. Wang at one point. They did breakthrough stuff with relational databases and that lead me to become a database specialist for the remainder of my career.
The utilities, editor, compiler, and debugger were top notch. As was PACE, though it was hobbled by its dependence on DMS/TX rather than being a true RDBMS. But Wang Labs had many good ideas that were ahead of anyone else.
Dear Asianometry, As a young man in my early 20's working for the massive San Francisco Law Firms, I remember the entire floor was the Word Processing floor, it was composed of 30 to 40 women working on IBM Mag Card Selectrics using carbon paper. When the elevator door opened the noise was loud and staggering, and the room was filled with a blue-gray pallor in the air as everyone of the operators smoked ( mostly women of course ). All of that changed. One day I came to work and was doing a delivery to the Word Processing floor, and as the elevator door opened, the floor was quit, no smoke and almost empty except for 6 or 8 individuals working on these strange large cabinet like things with keyboards and screens, the word WANG was at the top. Fascinated I walked over and watched over the shoulder of one of the operators as they showed me how they could store entire pages of information and move words, sentences, or paragraphs all over the page, They were expensive, but the saved the firm a fortune in wages and benefits, and it was like looking at the future.
So much to say after watching this, so sad that Dr Wang’s dying wish was for his company to be remembered and honored for being founded by an immigrant, I looked up his name at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and they have hardly anything about him. wang should be better remembered. sadly very few people remember this company and even less know it’s founder, even though they went toe to toe with IBM. one other interesting note besides the invention of core memory, Wang invented the SIMM. incredible work on this video, as always your videos are so rich with details and nuanced history. I’m blown away. The anecdotes you mention about An Wang, his early history, all the pictures of products, I can’t heap enough praise. The story about John Cunningham is quite sad too, he is not remembered at all and sadly passed away in 2013. just a sad story all around. I want wait for this video to be public so I can share it. this story needs to be known.
The racism is still here and strong though. Brandon and his bandits are chomping at the bit to war with China whilst at the same time proving how a barbarian too can be so arrogant. Dark days in USA today.
@@John_Smith_86 This kind of mentality is only going to perpetuate survivorship bias and the misconception that success is easy to achieve and maintain in the tech world. The lapses in judgement by this company's management should be remembered as a lesson on how easy it is to lose everything you built despite early successes.
I think part of the problem is that so many of the computer history folks have been California-centric. There was a lot of work being done in the Route 128 Tech Corridor in Massachusetts and people mostly remember DEC and maybe remember Data General but all of the other companies working there have mostly been ignored by the people focussed on California. Wang, Stratus, and Pr1me seem almost unknown today. And companies like Centurion and Convex out of Texas or any of the midwest manufacturers other than CDC seem to get ignored too.
Not sure how long the name will last but the Wang Theatre is still there in Boston. It used to be called Wang Center now it is a Boch Center/Wang Theatre.
In 1982, I was *privileged* to derive benefits from the 2 Wang Word Processors. Previously we had to proof read the printed papers from IBM Selectric typewriters; and we dreaded changes because that meant that the secretaries had to retype the page itself. With the Wang Word Processors, we could read the text in the CRT and made corrections before being printed. And even after printing, we could make changes and it was so much faster to edit and print again: something that we take for granted nowadays. The honour of using the Wang Word Processors were only given to the senior secretaries and the junior ones had to wait to learn and use. The reason? Each word processor costs SGD 18k then; and a fresh accounting graduate's monthly salary was only around $1k. LOL
The best WP feature Wang had was the Work page; I hid more than a few documents I knew someone untrained would screw up there. And it was easy to create Glossaries (macros) to work with.
I provided tech support for secretaries working with Wang VS word processing systems. I enjoyed figuring out how to solve advanced document editing and formatting the secretaries wished to implement. The terminals were weird in the they were connected using dual coax cables.
This made me sad. As a Chinese American who also a Shanghainese, Wang's story is so typical and relatable to many Asian families. The first generation experienced war and hardship, came to the US and worked extremely hard to build up a successful family foundation. I remember hearing my parents talking about Wang labs when they were poor graduate studentsin America. I'm also old enough to grow up poor in China and struggled along side my parents. Forged in hardship, my parents were frugal and shrewed, built up several million in 30 years, and I am successful enough to expand it further. Yet, unlike us, my children are born relatively wealthy, never known hardship. Listening to Wang's story strengthens my worry that their lack the 吃苦奋斗 spirit would eventually undo the labor of two generations. Wang's story illustrates the old Chinese saying 富不过三代, and shows a major flaw of Asian family traditions.
@gius db agreed. That asian family tradition and irrational focus on passing it down the family line is why Wang's story is such a sad but common one. A rational person would pass on the success to people who can best continue it, but we asians are rarely willing to let an "outsider" carry our legacy, until invariably a 败家子 destroys everything the previous generations built.
This story of the rise and fall of this company is also the story of the rise and fall of many other companies and many other projects, endeavors, even families. Passing on a legacy is one of the biggest challenges that any group of invested people have.
@@sjb3460 there is nothing wrong with spelling out one's ethnicity and citizenship. Being an immigrant nation, ethnicity and citizenship coexist naturally. I'm proud to be an American citizen, and I also embrace my Chinese cultural heritage. Political correctness shouldn't be so extreme as to deny different races exist.
@@sjb3460 I do think of myself as an American citizen, and of Chinese ethnicity, hence Chinese American is a perfect clear term, just as African American, Hispanic American, Irish American. I don't know why anyone would have a problem with people liking their ethnicity.
I joined Wang in 1970, working in the QA dept. Sometimes we would get a unit back that did not provide the proper answers, run the diagnostic and it would pass. I started decoding the diagnostic at lunch and Dr. Wang stopped to ask why I was working during lunch, I explained the problem and he said I will check with you tomorrow. The next day he stopped, I explained that I had found the diagnostic problem (never had any programming classes and only a HS graduate) and showed him the difference and explained what I had changed. He asked me to follow him into the research group, introduced me and said I would be the diagnostic programmer for the group. A while later he paid for me to attend Lowell Tech nights to get a degree. I never had a problem understanding him and always enjoyed talking with him. I left in 1972 to join a small startup later purchased by 3M. I am always thankful for Dr. Wang helping me find a great career.
I just found out I have ALS and I want you to know. You are one of the reasons I have to keep living. I love your content so much. Thanks for all you do here.
Wang was a force to be reckoned with at their peak. It's too bad they ended up failing but the tech industry is full of huge companies that ended up dead. DEC, Sun, Compaq... The list is long. Some got bought out before they failed but they wouldn't have survived if they hadn't been bought.
I'm 45, I remember seeing commercials for them on TV as a kid and that they had something to do with computers but really had no idea what they were about.
As someone grew up literally down the road (next town over) from Wang's last HQ in Lowell, appreciated the video and will certainly recommend to share it as a local history in north and northwest suburbs of Boston However, one thing didn't cover in the video is their philanthropy. Wang An and Lorraine donated to renovate the Wang Theater in Boston and it is still to this date the leading performing arts center in Boston. The Boch family elected to keep the Wang name even after they purchased the naming right
@@RaymondHng duh.... His name is always "Wang An" or "Wong On" in the Chinese community. Family name always goes first for East Asian names in East Asian languages
@@champan250 Yes. But you are writing entirely in English, not in an East Asian language and he is a U.S. citizen, so his Chinese name, 王安, has been Anglicized into English and Western name order as An Wang. You write his wife's name as _Lorraine Wang_ , not as "Wang Lorraine". If he were a Chinese national or Taiwanese national, then Eastern name order would be preserved such as Mao Zedong and Tsai Ing-Wen.
@@RaymondHng exactly what you pointed out..., he didn't have an Anglicized name, so writing his name in Wang An is paying respect to him and to his insistence of not adopting a fake Anglicized name
@@champan250 When he became a naturalized United States, his legal name became An Wang. It has, in fact, been romanized into the Latin alphabet script, not Chinese script.
I was a tech for Wang assigned to the Chicago downtown team. it was the best company I've ever worked for. I've met Dr. Wang several times at Wang Institute Lawrence and several Pride in Service awards. The man was a genius and ahead of his time. I knew when he gave up the realm to Cunningham and his Fred, I knew it was time to go. I can recall my managers being dumb as heck except Jose and District Manager Rocco who I used to help when he was a tech. My mentor Dave Ros guided a rookie me. I met many good techs, the like of Lenny, this dude named Peterson, John R. O' Malley, William Pickett, Bob D, and many more I can only see their friendly faces on my brain but not their names. I was the primary tech for Harris Bank, Continental Bank, and Northern Trust Bank.
I knew Rocco too as I worked for the Chicago South group in the Sales group. I worked for Wang from 1980 until they closed the doors in 1993. Saddest day in my career. It was a great company to work for.
Joined Wang in 1978 (before the towers) - it is hard to appreciate, in the moment ,what you were experiencing. I do remember the emotional conversation over whether to stay with the Motorola 68000 chipset and run CPM (and staying proprietary) for PC's versus the Intel 8080 chipset running Q-DOS the forerunner to MSFT DOS and windows - it was the decision that brought them down.. Jobs pulled off what Wang could not on proprietary architecture versus open platform but it took him two tries and he was fired in between those two tries - Wang died on that battlefield long before Jobs won. The video was accurate to the detail - An Wang, Lorraine, Fred, Courtney and Juliette (who I never met) were all driven people, with the right ideas but timing is everything - they were right on the timing for many things but off by 10 years on others. Wang also had major insight into DVX (digital voice messaging) and wang net, a fore-runner to multiplex, multi service communications, using ethernet as a service as well as voice and proprietary band on CATV cable before anyone thought of it - way ahead of its time - they just ran out of gas - but technology owes the family a great debt for their thinking ... the first warriors on any battlefield end up dying, but they also make the most material gains ..
Wow this is very intersting …. I get Nastalgic about technology, I missed it all never paid attention now as a senior I’m catching up and it’s all very intersting to me …
I liked the 68000 except the random panic design decision to disable program counter relative addressing. I also liked the z80. All they had to do with the z80 was to move it from 8 bit to 16 bit and then from 16 bit to 32 bit, without changing anything else. A multiply instruction maybe the only addition. And a 32 bit z80 would provide some 64 bit capability. There has been a history of bad decisions in CPU architectures that has resulted in a few winners and a lot of losers. Sometimes it's been neutral like the ARM64 bit architecture is meh but commercial momentum...
Wang was a pivotal system at my bank employer in the early 1980s, before being surpassed by the whole networked IBM PC environment in the mid-80's. WANG Basic was very well implemented, and it ran DBase II as the foundation for some early custom analytical tools. Thanks for the very interesting and detailed analysis!
I arrived in Lowell, Mass in 1975 and lived there for 30 years. I saw first hand the rise and fall of Wang. It was a great addition to the economy of the Lowell area. The tower still stands as a testament to a glorious past.
The pulp research lab where I worked a summer job in 1969 used a Wang calculator to compute a key factor from the tests we ran. It had a keyboard and display unit connected to the main unit that was on an upper floor. Most technicians performed the calculations in steps, writing down and reentering intermediate results. I figured how to use its memory to run it start to finish without breaks.
Wow.... By the tone of your voice we can see (hear) that you were sad by the end of the video.... Dont be sad ! What a honor for him and his family to see such an excellent video ! Keep up the excellent work and may God bless you always !
Technical genius foiled by management hubris. In some ways, it reminds of Kodak's failure to embrace digital photography. A fair reminder that skills and experience are non-transferrable between people or fields of study.
Being born in 1987 I never heard of Wang as a big player, my perception started with IBM, Intel and then AMD. It is simply mindblowing that such a recent pioneer as Wang went under my (and I guess the public's) radar. As always, thank you for the enlightenment.
Boston was a centre for the minicomputer wars, with: DEC, Data General, Wang, Prime, and Apollo amongst the players from the 1960-1980s. That war with IBM, amongst themselves, and eventually with PCs would make an interesting video. . .
As I remember, there was a high concentration of these companies along or near a single state route in the area. A google search says this was Route 128. Some died out because they didn't transition to including microcomputers/PC's like DEC, Wang, and Data General. I'm not sure what happened to the others. It would have been nice to have this area continue its high tech industries.
@@palmercolson7037 As the MINIcomputer market was winding down, Data General was pivoting towards other markets, including the growing storage market. EMC acquired Data General principally for DG's mid-sized storage systems. EMC was weak in that space so it was an important deal. A lot of the DG staff continued working for EMC and DG shareholders got paid out. That was a better exit than a lot of the competition experienced.
Ah, memories. I was an engineer at DEC... Knew Edson @ Data General very well... Ex wife worked for Somerville Lumber programming their Wang computer... And I'm close friends with the founder of Apollo ( who previously worked at Prime )! And that doesn't even mention all the supercomputer companies! Thinking Machines, Alliant, Kendall Square... Lots was going on around Route 128 back then!
@@paulcantrell01451 Where did all that talent and knowledge go? Not long ago,, some Minicomputer makers were quite vertically integrated, with component production & assembly around Boston.
There's a book I have about an at the time competing company, Norsk Data, and it has a quite grave 1991 bullet point which reads "ND suffers the same fate as Wang, terminating in-house development of the last of their remaining own products". ND also went belly-up in 1992, after this book was published. There is a striking similarity in how both these two giants crumbled to dust in a record-short time, from the rise of open standards in professional computing (book not only mention PCs, but also puts great emphasis on UNIX-machines and in general standards from the likes of ISO, DIN and ANSI).
Ah good old Tandem. That would be a good story for sure. I worked for Unigate Dairies and they couldn't afford Tandem computers to provide high availability to dozens of distribution sites around the UK. So we programmed high availability into the application software instead using redundant Datapoint systems. It worked!! Good job the Datapoint 'whizzy' hard drives were very unreliable.
I AM STILL VERY PROUD BEEN A MEMBER OF THE WANG COMPUTERS (NOT WONG)! IT IS NOT ONLY SAD BUT HEARTBREAKING. WITH LOADS OF COMMENTS HERE & EMPLOYEE HISTORIES, HEARTS BLEED. WANG LAB INC & DR AN WANG ARE BIG LEGENDs . I HAD “MISCARRIAGE” DUE TO MUCH DEDICATION TO MY WORK.
Ken Olson was one of my neighbors on Governors Island in Lake Winnipesaukee. As a Laconia High School student at the time I remember Ken explaining sad tales of Digital Computer and what was going on. Dr. Wang visited a few times he was friendly but hard at the same time. What an era to live through ... it was 1970
As to digital going better for Mr. O, I would say only this after having worked there for five years: beware matrix management that you manipulate furiously from behind the scenes, all while claiming you don't have a hand in decision-making. Eventually you wind up with a system that will ignore and work around you, and then break your sword off at the haft as you try to change it. Ask Ken, he knows.
I remember a media interview with Ken. They asked 'How many people work for Digital'? He thought for a moment and replied, "About half.". There was a phrase that went around DEC that went: If you get to work late you have to leave early to make up for it. To which I added, "especially if you took a long lunch.".
My first job out of college in 1984 was inside Berklee School of Music and i was just a lackey but i remember the day they took my IBM Selectric out and put me in front of the Wang Word Processor and IBM AT machines to "type into". The "IT" person who theyu brought in (there was no word for "IT" yet so they just called her "The Wang girl" (LOL) carried a Wang "laptop" which she carried in a wheeled suitcase because it was huge but she was like a rock star. The Wang did a great job with words and it inspired me to begin a career as a journalist, then copywriter and I ended up as a lead reviewer for WIRED and Macworld and was first in covering the iPhone when it launched. I met Jobs, Woz, and though i never met Wang, i did walk past the Wang Building every morning at South Station in Boston on my way to Berklee.
I started out with Wang word processing computers back in the early to mid '80's and they transformed the typing the world. Prior to Wang, it is possible one would have to re-type 80 pages or so of a document due to the addition/change of one single word. Suddenly editing, copying, saving, printing and even document sharing was possible. Nothing but grateful thanks to Mr. Wang from this longtime typist.
When a company is founded on the genius, drive, and vision of one person, rarely is there a replacement found when that person steps down from leadership. The rest is history.
Maybe I'm mistaken but I seem to recall at the time of the Wang Word Processor, the company's pitch was for the "Paperless Office." It was a very powerful concept. Also I had an engineer friend win a Wang PC through a company contest and I recall he was not crazy about the machine. It is all ancient history now.
The paperless office was a Big Deal at that time. ISTR that the commercials talked about that. They wanted to integrate Voice, Data, and Word processing. The Wang PC was engineered better than the IBM PC at the time. It was faster (8086, not 8088), and all the plug-in cards were self-identifying, something that would be a long time coming on the IBM PC. The big problem with it was that it generally wasn't compatible with the IBM and so got left in the dust, something that others saw well before Wang did, unfortunately.
I got into UT Austin when I said I wanted to go to MIT at the start of high school. UT Austin is a perfectly fine school, but my parents still think it's crap. That's the problem with Asian parenting, you get a 95 on the test and they're mad at you because you didn't get 100.
The problem is that Asian parents value you based on your academic achievements rather than loving you as a person and for what you can do to make your friends' lives better.
@@nyanpasu64 No the problem is they grew up in a time when where you went to school mattered. Today not so much anymore. Maybe it might matter more if you wanted an academic career, but not for normal careers.
@@nyanpasu64 it kinda digusting that there are many people in this comment section said Wang failure was because he didn't treat his son harsh enough, jesus
Asian parents grew up in a time and place where age equates to wisdom and status. That doesn't translate to a place like America where prosperity is best sought through youthful experimentation and market disruption.
6:12 "If you don't like name of company, you go work for company you like name better!" 👏👏👏 When you're a visionary who struggles a bit with English, but you still have a blunt point to get through. Love this man.
Outstanding (and very sad for the ones we went thru it). I started working with Wang Computers (the 2200) in 1976 in Caracas, Venezuela. Then I came in 1984 to work in the Lowell Towers. Now my story..! READ IT because it could cause a different outcome for wang. So, here you go. I was working on the 4th Floor in the 3rd Tower (the newest one), and around 6:30pm, a hardware engineer showed Dr. Wang an advanced prototype of a Wang PC cloned with the Intel 8088 (the original that IBM PC had). Dr. Wang was fuming! that we were cloning IBM, and he told the engineer that 'he would never do that!'. So we (at Wang) developed a Wang PC with a more advanced Intel processor (8086) and created our own BIOS, so we (Wang) would be better, faster, and unique than the original IBM PC. Could we follow the PC clone industry? We could have a Word Processor for the PC! (Multimate did it). Dr. Wang was a brilliant mind but terrible at choosing people under him. He created an organigram of loyal Chinese friends.
I have been trying unsuccessfully to find info about this after watching your video, but my mother had some recollection about An Wang being on a Chicago expo or fair floor for the Wang Laboratories booth even after being diagnosed with cancer. A real embodiment of enterprise and entrepreneurship.
I first became aware of WANG in 1972 via my wife, who after graduation as a math/CS major had gone to work (as receptionist / secretary) in the Trust Department of a Washington, DC bank. She used a WANG calculator for tasks like computing bond yields and convinced them to buy her a WANG 2200, writing interactive BASIC programs for the same tasks. She also moonlighted at a company which created 2200 based turn-key systems. A few years later in 1979 after working as photographer and photo lab tech at National Geographic I went to work at a magazine printer where I was promoted from production troubleshooter, planner then production manager. I discover the company used a WANG 2200 dual 8” floppy computer as part of turn-key printing estimating system and started staying in the evenings after the estimator who used it went home to teach myself how to program in BASIC, developing some programs to solve printing planning tasks like pagination and calculating page layouts for the presses. Then armed with those programs I did a demo for upper management making a pitch for the then new eight user WANG 2200 MVP system to create a job status tracking and billing system. On the MVP up to eight “dumb” terminals consisting CRT and keyboard were connected via I/0 boards to a central CPU which ran on an 8-bit microprocessor on a time share basis. It was one of the first, if not the first, microcomputers which used a main-frame style hard disk unit the size of a small filing cabinet which contained a 14” fixed and 14” removable 5MB platters. Printing was done using a high-speed band printer attached to the CPU. There was no disk operating system, just a set of BASIC commands WANG added to BASIC to read and write variables to the disk. It was also designed with the intention of having the eight users running eight different programs not for sharing data between them. Each terminal only had 28k Bytes of memory for running the programs. I created my job tracking DB by figuring out I could create and write a two dimensional alpha-numeric variable $A(x,y) which contained four 56 byte records to fit each 256 byte sector on the disk which allowed me to read and write records by sector / record number. Because there was no DOS, much less a multi-user one, I had to devise my own way via flipping a bit in the sector header to lock out other users to prevent overwriting files and created my own indexing and binary search routines for searches and sorts. At one point I did a demo of what I was doing to the WANG sales team thinking I might convince them to hire me as an instructor but they didn’t seem understand the potential of how I was sharing data between users and how it would allow a computer-savvy manager to kept track of job status and productivity from their desktop, which was one of my goals as production manager when designing the system. The company also didn’t see the potential but another I demo’d my system to did and in 1980 offered me 20% more to to become its systems manager to develop a similar job estimating/status tracking/billing system on a DEC PDP11/44 it used for general accounting. In 1980 I had also seen help wanted ad placed by the US Information Agency seeking printing production managers for its overseas publishing centers. I applied and interviewed but nothing came of it until 1982 when I got a call from them wanting me to interview again. I took the job and became a foreign service printing specialist. I discovered that USIA used WANG WPS and VS units and made a pitch to get access to a machine I could run the software I had already developed which I had stored on 14” disk and develop new applications. But the IT managers, none of them who knew how to code, vetoed the request. Undaunted I went down the street to Radio Shack and purchased a TRS 80 Model 100 “laptop” which I carried back and forth to work in the top case of my Honda GL500 “Silverwing” motorcycle and took with me overseas to Manila in 1983 when assigned there as production manager. I didn’t get my hands on a Agency issued PC which was equipped with LOTUS 1-2-3 until 1984, which is when I switched to developing macro driven Lotus spreadsheet databases. In 1987 I got into another battle with the IT bureaucrats over purchasing Macs for typesetting and page layout. They controlled all IT purchasing and blocked the request. We won that battle by convincing upper management that Macs where graphic arts workstations not computers. Around 1990 I got a copy of Filemaker Pro for the Mac and started developing multi-user applications using it while performing my regular management duties, then as the admin. officer of the Manila Center where I rans a ethernet network of about twenty macs which performed production tasks like typesetting and page layout and all the administrative functions using shared Filemaker database applications I created. USIA and the State Department had invested heavily in centralized WANG VS systems and into the early 1990s were still installing WANG VS terminals running contractor produced software that wasn’t user friendly. By then in our printing center every keystroke generated, including drafts of e-mails, was done in Filemaker databases which allowed me to manage from my desktop, just as I had envisioned back in 1979 when I made the pitch to get my WANG MVP system.
@@borisborcic I can’t argue with that because I was a printing production manager wanting to use a computer to solve problems like job tracking and estimating on my own, not a programmer. At the time the dumb terminal CRT / keyboard wasn’t capable of much more than the BASIC commands could execute. The advantage of interactive BASIC for me was the ability to write and run code incrementally without needing to compile it.
Wang Labs was a key to the success of Shugart Associates, where I worked. It was a major customer for floppy disk drives, and the pioneering customer for the 8 inch hard drive, paying $5000 each for a 2 platter 10MB 8-inch drive.
The success stories in tech come down to pairing a world-class genius like Dr. Wang with the businesspeople that can manage it. He clearly had a world-class sales team, but got himself too involved in R&D to the pointof not being able to hand it off. This is a very common refrain in tech, of having a visionary founder but no control over the employees. Those who succeed are always the one where the tech and the business side can look at each other with mutual respect and trust.
My grandfather worked for a Wang competitor. He thought Wang's switch to office word processing was a killer as it was low hanging fruit for the rest of the industry.
I do remember the tail end of the story back when I was a kid, reading about it. There are a lot of managers who believe they are indispensable but there are really only a handful that truly are. Nobody could replace him so nobody did. And, once the IBM PC became the standard it was all over for such specialized and expensive products as Wang produced. His wife's attitude towards their sons education sounds almost a cliché of the immigrant Chinese family. It must've been a difficult environment in which to grow up.
Don't forget the clones. Yes, IBM getting into the PC market, made PCs a legitimate business tool, but affordable clones, and more importantly PC compatible clones moving up to the 386, when IBM balked, opened them to the masses. I got into electronics, when dedicated proprietary systems, were still in vogue. Back in 1979, both Tektronix (8002, 8550/8560) and HP (64000) made proprietary development systems, for making microprocessor based product. Everything from the whole computer, including their own proprietary OS, to the emulator pod, that plugged into your target (your prototype) hardware. These units cost $10s of thousands. By the mid 1980s, competitors came out with just emulator pods, that plugged into a PC, by way of a serial port (COM1, COM2, ...) and cost in the $5000 range. By the late 1990s, you could get a USB plug in ISP for $35.
That part reminded me of a system analysis class I had in 1994 in which my professor maintained that PCs had no value for businesses and mainframes were the only worthwhile business system.
Sad story, I remember Wang machines being competitors to Nixdorf machines in Europe back in the day, never knew the backstory so thanks for telling it.
Very Interesting. As a Chemical Engineering student in the early 1970's we had a Chemical Process laboratory that required significant calculating capabilities for the experiments. To support this, we had a Wang Lab which had some type of CPU with several small terminals connected to it. We had access to an IBM mainframe but, at this time, this required punch cards to program it and wasn't really suitable to support most of the process lab experiments. Also we were still using slide rules for a lot of stuff... I had a Post Versa log. A couple significant events occurred during my time there. First, primarily the computer science and math majors started using dumb terminals for most of their programming. This was the beginning of the end of the cumbersome punch card programing. Secondly, a colleague of mine that had access to more money than most of us bought an HP35 calculator. We all know where this led, and I suppose spelled the beginning of the end of some of the Wang Products, not to mention the end of the slide rule industry.
Thank you for this! I did work experience @ Wang when I was 15 years old in 1985 in Perth, Western Australia - I thoroughly enjoyed working there - it set me up for a career working in IT. I've often wondered what happened to Wang... now I know!
I worked for Wang '79 to '94 and suggest An Wang's book "Lessons" (easily found). It could well hold the key as to why our PC was not software compatible with I B M.
Excellent documentary. I had interviewed at Wang Labs back in the 70s and was even introduced to Dr. Wang himself during the interview, apparently part of his approach of overseeing all aspects of the company. I didn't get hired. But ironically, some time later, was hired by CompuGraphic. I never knew, until watching this documentary, that Wang Labs was a critical part of getting Compugraphic started. I was hired into the R&D department at Compugraphic as a software engineer and was there for three years before it finally dawned on me that Compugraphic really had no idea what to do with software engineers. They manufactured, big, clunky typesetting machines and just didn't understand the growing field of software engineering. The only developments in the R&D department that had any chance of becoming products or parts of products were those developed by the hardward people in the R&D lab. Over the year there were an average of 6 software engineers (with fairly high turnover) and none of us were ever given an actual project to work on. The attitude was basically, "Go ahead, just play around with things", but no actual leadership at all. The overall company's official attitude was "We're not an industry leader, we're a fast follower". At one point the company brought in a consultant, apparently in an attempt to shake things up, and the most he did was establish a catch-phrase for the comp[any, namely "Do it right the first time". I never figured out how that was supposed to accomplish anything, especially in the R&D department. Their most succesful year, at least in terms of profit, was when they sold off some nearby property, with that sale constituting the major part of their profits. In 1987, Compugraphic was acquired by European competitor Agfa-Gevaert and the buildings and land in Wilmington, Massachusetts sold off. Compugraphic basically simply ceased to exist. I would love to see Asionometry do a documentary about Compugraphic.
I worked at a major printing company in Nashville, Tennessee, the now defunct Baird-Ward, in early 1983. When I started, they were beginning to replace Compugraphic equipment with Agfa-Gevaert and the Apple Lisa computers for typesetting. The Lisa computers were replaced by the Macintosh Plus in 1985. Before I left in 1990, new state of the art Agfa-Gevaert typesetters and Macintosh II computers were installed.
@@mistermac56 One of the very few interesting things that happened while I was in the R&D department of Compugraphic was that we purchased one of the, then brand new just-on-the-market, Apple Lisa computers and got to play with it. There was no actual objective in acquiring it, no plans for it, but it was something to play with. The Lisa had only incredibly crude graphics capabilities, definitely no animation, but I found a little trick to make it at least LOOK like something dynamic was happening graphically. I got it to show a ball bouncing across the screen. Yeah, not much at all by today's standards, but pretty cool at the time. I would leave it with the bouncing ball running on it and people walking by would stop, fascinated by what it was doing, and no one else figured out how I had done it.
I spent several years working on the Wang 2200 with their version of interpreted Basic 2. Wang had 40,000+ dedicated customers for this easy to program, easy to troubleshoot, easy to implement platform. This was a good sized market share in those days. But when they moved to their bigger and better machine and discontinued the 2200, they provided no upgrade path. They never ported Basic 2 to the new platform. In my estimation, that was the major reason for their downfall. By the time they brought back the 2200 several years later, huge numbers of their customers had moved off of Wang hardware to use NIAKWA Basic 2 on a PC network and never looked back. They never did port Basic 2 to their bigger hardware.
"The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder gives an insider's view of minicomputer development at Data General (and the Boston area in general). It is a classic tech management book and a fun read. My grandfather was there and knew almost everyone in the book. He said, the book overall was pretty faithful to the culture and environment. Today, the "Dasher" keyboard colour schemes are popular choices for mechanical keyboard aficionados.
I worked at Wang Labs in Lawrence, and eventually at Wang Europe in Brussels as a curriculum developer and technical instructor for the operating systems internals of their OIS and VS product lines. Great experience, particularly living and working in Belgium, but it was also disheartening to feel the company falling apart and being helpless to do anything but go down with it. It was small consolation to know that the other hi-tech giants such as Digital and Data General had also failed to understand the potential of PCs and they all went down about the same times.
Wow! My mother worked for them for like 30 years, and I cut my teeth on programming on Wang machines from a young age. I decided I wanted to own a software company, and that actually happened, though not as I expected (the company JAST USA popularized English translated Hentai visual novels).
Peter Payne if your mother is Linda, she was my mentor!!! Abbie Morrison here - I worked with her first in Rockville and then in San Diego. She was one of the most awesome people I have ever met in my life. Sending love to you and your family.
In 1986 I worked for a firm in Las Vegas that used a Wang stand alone word processing unit. It was OK, but there were two things about it that really bothered me. We were doing scientific work, and much of it included math calculations. The machine could do sub-scripts and super-scripts. You know, a number squared has a "2" above the number, just after it. That's a super script. Sub-script was the same thing, but below the line. BUT THE MACHINE COULD NOT DO BOTH ON THE SAME LINE!!! If you did a super-script on a line and then tried to sub-script another number, the later number just came out level with the line. Same thing in reverse. Because of this, we couldn't use the machine very much. The OTHER problem was the built-in spell checker. The word "WANG" came out as a spelling error! I grant that this was an early generation machine, and otherwise it was great to work with, but why?
I worked as a programmer on Wang VS systems for AT&T. They also needed Super and Sub Scripts for preparing rate tarrifs. We had hundreds of people in typing pools using the systems. I ended up developing custom Xerox telecommunications print drivers in Zerox's printer language, Xix or Zix I think it was called, so you could do both super and sub on one line and print on Xerox printers by communication with 2400 baud modems. Saved a ton of money too since Zerox printers were so much cheaper than Wang printers.
I remember when one of our departments got a Wang word processor in 1981 which made abstract submission documentation easy. It cost me a fortune in presents to the secretaries, but it was worth it in time saved.
I started my WP career on Wang Labs, one of the best systems I've ever had the pleasure to work on. We had them at the WTC for several years. The last program we used on it was LBM Galley, then replaced them with PCs. Worked on a Wangwriter 2236DE Interactive Emulator but the OS system I had the most fun on. Such a shame they didn't last.
An excellent history. As you said the problems went way beyond Fred Wang. Not many of the proprietary minicomputer makers - DEC, Prime, Norsk Data, Data General, etc., survived 1992! The market had just moved on to much better value workstations - whose lunch in turn got eaten by PCs in the early 00s.
Very interesting. I was one of three individuals at Blue Cross of California that built their giant Word Processing Center in Woodland Hills, CA. In 1975 I was tasked with replacing the IBM word processing machines with "something more productive." After a long investigation, I chose the Wang Word Processing System. Our Center at Blue Cross was staffed with over 120 employees on 3 shifts, so the equipment investment was enormous. Because we were one of Wang's biggest customers, I often visited An Wang at his headquarters in Lowell, Massachusetts. The reason I mention that is because the executives at Blue Cross, including myself, at many, many in person meetings, pronounced Dr. Wang's name like "bang", not "wong". I was never corrected in how I pronounced his, and his company's name in any of those meetings. Where did you find the pronunciation you used?
From his Chinese name 王安 Wáng Ān, which is most correctly pronounced "wong" with a rising tone English speakers usually hear as a question mark. To differentiate between the two better (even though they are intimately linked), perhaps the narrator could pronounce "wong?" for the man and "wang!" for the company as it was known on the market.
I am 38 and work in IT. Somehow I never came across any hints this company and it's hardware. Just wow. This is the discovery of the day. What a vivid example of hereditary mindset shortcomings.
I work in public sector IT, which suffers from "fiscal responsibility" compliances and other considerations that gum up the procurement process. While there's no Wang equipment around anymore, I have occasionally found Wang branded mousepads and the like, and older coworkers have mentioned swapping out old Wang terminals.
Many companies in Boston's route 128 + missed the PC revolution. President of Digital famously said the world needed 3 PCs. That's partly why we hear of Silicon Valley not Route 128. It sad to hear about Wang's end. Its family drama no doubt make for an interesting story.
Thank you for a great little doco - such an interesting story. Seems like Dr Wang had his heart set on a family business in an industry that quickly changed and relied on outside influence. A sad fall from grace but an important lesson.
Thanks for putting this together. My family worked for Wang for over a decade, and the tragedy of An Wang’s mistakes were always plain to see, but culturally, they couldn’t break the Asian mould (speaking up when the ships on fire… or even when it’s leaking). My uncle’s trajectory at Wang R&D was similar, bc he was an engineering prodigy finishing his Elect Eng degree at 16, and like An Wang didn’t have the social skills and nous to see the writing on the wall and deal with poor management, he almost survived to the bitter end to 91, but there’s serendipity. … he retrained as a wealth manager in Hong Kong/China/Australia, developed his social skills and never looked back.
I remember working on a Wang 2200 as a young construction engineer. Later I worked for the company that designed the software. It ran on a Wang 2200 using the Basic-2 language. By the time I got there, they were transitioning to PC's using a Niakwa Compiler. Time flies.
I worked the last 5 or so years of my career in the building that had originally been the Wang Towers, now the Cross Point building in Lowell MA, three 12-story towers. For a while, you could still make out the faded Wang name at the top. Once that general-purpose PCs incorporated word-processing functions, the writing was on the wall for Wang and standalone word processors. Also, Wang had lucrative patent rights on core memory that was at one time the only game in town, but that ran out and got eclipsed by newer memory technology. Wang played a part in the history and development of high-tech, so can be proud of that. They had a good run. The churn, change and evolution is part of the game. Companies do not really die so much as their people disperse and reconfigure for new and better things.
The 1st National Geographic article on Silicon Valley in 1980 had an advertisement of Wang this continued till 1986, after which it somehow fell off the map
My mother was a secretary pool member in the early to mid 80s, and when things started converting from electric typewriters (including selectrics) to computers, WPS support still had some demand. The majority of the pool moved to wordperfect. There might have been some residual wordstar users, but I don't recall anybody using Word.
I grew up in North Billerica, next to Lowell Massachusetts. There was a big Wang office. Thanks for this video, I never knew any of this before watching.
Early in my career I was looking after an IBM mainframe but I also acquired responsibility for a Wang VS system running the organisation's word processing. I knew nothing about Wang at the start, but there was a great wall of VS documentation, so I started reading it. After a while, I was outraged - this Wang system could do so much! It had fantastic facilities. And we were only using it for word processing. It seemed like a waste, a travesty. I read Kenney's book Riding the Runaway Horse, a history of Wang Laboratories, and developed a huge respect for Dr Wang, too. Sadly it was around that time that Wang started to decline, there was no future in pushing Wang. Eventually word processing switched to PCs, and the Wang system was sold, more or less for scrap. Sad. I never lost my admiration for Dr Wang, though - a true pioneer.
As a computer geek in high school An Wang held Hero status with a lot of us. It was sad to see the news back then of the companies demise. His death in 92 seemed to be the end of an era. Thanks for posting. This brough back a lot of memories.
I worked for DEC from mid 80's to 1992 when I was laid off, then for a year at an annoying telemarketing company that used 6 Wang VS systems to run the auto-dialers and manage call lists. I managed the IT dept. for our location and one day after returning from lunch the door to the computer room was open and there was a fan in the doorway. There had been some air conditioning failure and no one had time to page me. I barely got the words out of my mouth to shut everything down before systems started crashing and the large removable disks started having head crashes. The company started switching over to DEC VAXes after that. I left and went back to work for DEC as a consultant just before their demise. I loved working for DEC, but it was still rewarding working with the Wang systems. I was never aware of the history, but thanks to this impressive video I now do. Interestingly I recently ran into a woman working at Target in California who had a New England accent. I remarked I used to work for DEC and she said she used to work as an assembler for Wang.
The Wang 3300 was the first "real" computer I had a chance to program in high school. Loading the BASIC system from paper tape took FOR.EVER, but as a tech-geek high schooler in the days before personal computers this was the hottest thing that was available to me. Taught me a lot, had a lot of fun with it. Thanks, Dr. Wang.
What a brilliant life. Regardless of what happened to WANG Labs. Wang the Man, is the epitome of quiet guines and overcoming any an all adversity by self confidence and will .
In 1981 my wife and I bought an Amstrad computer with a plug in modem not requiring the phone handpiece to be hung on it. All memory and software was stored on little 100mm floppies holding about 110 K. The CRT, keyboard two drives and computer was one unit with a separate fast and clean dot matrix printer. I liked that it was menu driven and much nicer than the DOS IBM PC. Although only 128K ram the OS was undemanding and it was not slow for the day.. Processing power and speed improved rapidly and we bought a second one, games, spreadsheets, educational and special programs from other suppliers were compatible. They were good for sending faxed word processor documents from the modem. They cost about $!000 each and the floppies were a few bucks. We both used them for business and professional writing. As time went on they lost out to the much more popular IBM clones even before the windows OS, we eventually had to join the mob. I still have both of the Amstrads, printer and floppies in storage and some day soonish will carefully boot them up.
that's a sad story. i think i remember the commercial for some reason from early eighties even though i would've been like 4. the failed before i finished school. i could feel your sadness by the end, a very fitting title for such a pioneering person and company.😢
I was there as a field systems engineer from late 79 to 89 in Australia and saw it all from boom to bust. The difference was that when the end started in the US in 85-86, Australia was booming. Full steam ahead. We had just won the largest computer contract ever in the southern hemisphere, installing VS 100s with craploads of workstations and peripherals and TC in federal dole offices all over the country, followed up by another federal contract to install networked (original) PCs in all federal government DSS "Jobcenters", of which there was one in every town with more than a few thousand people. I was on the project teams for both contracts and spent a very memorable time flying all around the country for 18 months and doing solo road-trips of 2,500 kms. They were the fat days. I was young and single and used only my Per Diem for months on end as hotels and other stuff while traveling was on the company card and those paychecks went straight into the bank. Great internal management style. By far the best computer company I worked for in my career. I made lifelong friends and run a page for ex Wang Australian Alumni. Their product lead times were too slow when companies were moving from years to mere months in the conception/development to market times.
Excellent presentation, thanks. I visited Wang HQ in Lowell in February 1980 from the UK. My firm had one Wang WP machine. I lost track of Wang's path after that, until now. Its decline began or showed soon after our visit, so an extremely interesting film.
In the 90s I worked as a contractor and the client had a Wang, actually more than one. At first I thought they were kidding, it turns out they refused to upgrade. They were buying the stuff others were tossing out. Dell started support around 2000ish. They had us certified for y2k like 30 times and they were on Wang 🤷♂️. I moved end of 2004, so might still be using it 😉.
My first interview (didn’t get job, must have been 16) was for programming cobol on a Wang office system. Would have been ‘85. In ‘91 first computer job was getting a bunch of 286 pc clones in an office, with coax network and Novell server. Then to program FoxPro for customer DB. Got a call in 2000, they were still using it all!
YEah, I once worked at a University that was using Ungerman-Bass ethernet over cable TV rigid coax as a backbone. WHen the company went out of business, they were buying replacement gear at auctions from everyone else who was scrapping it... 5 Mbit ethernet :) What dopes. Hopefully they have gotten better, but I doubt it...
Great history lesson on WANG. Worked for Northrop in IT Network Services from 85 to 89. We had a huge WANG distributed word processing network. Recall seeing my first ever one gigabyte hard drives being installed in our WANG server. We had old time IBM mainframes, DEC and HP Super Minis as well. Installed a fiber optic backbone and switched almost all of the IBM, DEC and HP terminals to twisted pair through a Northern Telecom switch/frame using baluns. The WANG systems were so cool. A predecessor to today’s email. Then, along came the PC and word processing s/w, along with the ability to network them via twisted pair through the phone network; which ended the WANG Dynasty.
Dr Wang has been my hero. He hired me @20yrs old, just as vp/mvp/ois/vs we're under development. He was a caring father figure to me, insured I received both mentoring and education daily. Courtney and I used to play baseball on the weekends. Wang Labs prepared me to become principle engineer at Tektronix, and finish my career as chief engineer at HP. I would never achieved this without the Wang experience Thank you so much Father Wang
Wang did a great job selling VS computers to the US Air Force to run Civil Engineering and Services. I encountered them first in 1990, learning about disk packs and reel-to-reel tape. Eventually it was replaced with a "Wang" PC Server, and then others like Dell after that.
As with your other videos, this was a fascinating deep dive. I don't have any exciting memories of The Doctor or working for Wang, but I do fondly remember in the mid 1980s using what I believe were 2436 DE and 2536 DW terminals at my fist job in Toronto. The place was all Wang, but within a couple of years, they were phased out for Microsoft and Apple machines. Never knew the story of Wang till now.
As a pupil and teenager I had access to an "old" Wang 2200. I cannot recall if it ever was turned on, as I cannot remember the big box under the desk that was required to run it, but I really loved the keyboard, made from clear plastic caps and a paper layer underneath on which the letters were printed. I found the touch and feel was much better than of any home computer of the era or the C.Itoh 101e terminals we used for lectures and exams.
I love your videos not only for its content, but also you inserted jokes here and there such as photo of Chongqing in 1945 and 6.9 million caption haha. Wish you all the best!
Thanks for this video. I worked at Wang, first in the word processing R&D group in Lowell in 1977 before Wang had built the three towers and had casual interactions with Dr. Wang several times. I was subsequently in the marketing side in Asia and in other offices such as in New Orleans till I was let go in the early 90s. It was probably the best experience I had in my entire career, even though financially my naive strategy of putting most of my assets in Wang stock was an expensive financial lesson.
Back in college during the mid 1980's we had several WANG machines that did word processing and basic. I was a student and computer operator of that machine. The good old days. We also have DEC 10s and it was the early days off PC's.
In the 80s the first office computer they trained me to use was word processing on VS65. Eventually I learned 'Wang Decision Processing' language, procedure language, and became the Wang system administrator for two VS65 systems that supported a staff of about 40 users. It was a great experience for me as the technology of the day was not that complicated, and thankfully the very well built equipment would rarely go down. Sure hated when we did have problems as I would basically live at company while switching users and files between our two systems to keep part of the production cycle moving - while the downed system was being repaired. I was glad to have had that experience.
I worked for Wand from 1984 till 1989 In service then in sales. Some of the greatest co workers and memories I have had in my career. Your legacy is safe Dr. Wang.
I worked for Wang Labs at corporate headquarters ("The Towers...") for 8 years, first as a product manager for several software communications products and then as part of the marketing team for the Americas/Asia/Pacific region (China, Aus, NZ, Latin America, Canada). I joined in 1984 when the company was on a growth tear, profitable, and almost 32,000 employees and about $3B in revenue (and note that $3B was worth a lot more back then); I stayed until 1992, when the company declared Chapter 11, revenue dropped to about $1B, and 20k employees were laid off. I learned a tremendous amount at the company, travelled extensively (25+ countries), and not once ever thought we would fail, in spite of profitability, revenue, and product issues toward the end. Comments below lay blame on both Dr. Wang and on Fred (which are valid: Fred was not ready to take over the company, other senior managers (Cunningham, for example) saw no future for themselves and left, and the Doctor was unable to see beyond the end of the VS and the mini-computer). However, remember that several other companies - many of them based in Massachusetts - were also laid low by the rise of the personal computer, including DEC, Prime, and Data General.
I spent 40 years in the tech industry, the last 16 as a tech industry analyst (Gartner and a couple others). I have been with companies that have gone Chapter 11 (Wang), run out of cash and closed the doors, gone public, been acquired, or have gone through massive downsizing. Tech is not for the faint of heart, but I can honestly say in 40 years I was never once bored.
For readers who are newer to the tech industry, let me leave you with a couple thoughts on why the lessons of the ancient past (in tech, 1982 is ancient history) are still relevant:
.If you think what happened to Wang can't happen to you or your company, you are wrong. Change always happens, and in tech it happens fast. (social media companies, I am looking at you).
.The future is rarely predictable. Hard to realize today, but the idea of replacing typewriters, paper, and administrative assistants with computers was once radical.
.The tech industry is a roller coaster. To survive you need a strong stomach and a healthy amount of stamina. And luck is a large part of it, right next to innovation and hard work. Anyone who hits it big and tries to tell you they didn't get lucky is fooling themselves.
Great story by Asianometry, thanks for making this happen.
Excellent commentary.
You need luck. Until they started with advertising, Google had the best search engine but had no idea on how to profit from it.
Which other companies you were?
Best wishes.
Definitely a strong stomach for all the late night pizzas for all nighters
It was 1978. My high school purchased a Wang computer. It had 8 KB RAM, 2 8" 128 KB floppy drives, a mark sense card reader, a dot matrix printer, an IBM selectric printer, a CRT screen and keyboard. We had a very forward thinking computer science teacher that convinced the school to dish out $25,000 for the system. I was one of the students that stayed after school to do programming on it.
Great comment. Thank you for sharing.
U lived in lowell?
I went to collage with his son, Fred. He had more powerful computers in his dorm room than the school's physical sciences departments had. Fred is a really great person. In fact, in 1968, we had some lab reports for Chem 3 (physical chemistry) that required lots of complicated scientific notation calculations including trig and log functions. Slide rules and CRC handbook tables were the only option because the computers and sophisticated calculators were not yet available to the students. But Fred had a high end scientific WANG calculator with two terminals (nixie tubes!) in his dorm room. He had a signup sheet so the rest of his classmates could get 15 minutes chunks of time on his calculator; and 15 minutes on his calculator saved a few hours of table/slip-stick work. If he were Steve Jobs, he would have probably charged for the time.
I am so curious as to how old you are, would you mind telling? Also, what did you study in college? :)
@@Batman-rq2vx I'm 74, majored in Electrical Engineering. I've worked in computer design.
@@ByWire-yk8eh Man thats so cool, you have lived a really interesting life for sure. I just started studying computer engineering, so not quite the same, but still a bit similar :) Anyways, thank you for sharing :)
That’s awesome that he let that happen for free. That is a rare thing to see today. But it also shows that he wasn’t good at business unfortunately.
I dont know the cost or discount that could be given but he could have let his father know that and donate some of them and had a building named after him. Setup a scholarship in his name to be remembered since his company isn’t. I think I remember the super bowl ad? But I don’t remember the company but I was pretty young during all this.
I remember I went to a small private college for 2 years in the late 90’s and the next year everyone was getting a free laptop. A man who owned a It company donated 1 million to the university and supplied the laptops.
If memory serves the tuition went up $3000 the laptops were refurbished from his company and sold a new prices and marked up above a similar new computer.
I heard now they give you an air book and phone with spywear on it to block or report unchristian things.
@@ByWire-yk8eh Dang old heads be on youtube! My dad is like 68 and barely knows how to use his smartphone.
I started my professional programming career on Wang mini-computers. It was a much faster platform to program for than IBM systems at the time. Spent seven years on Wangs and watched them crash. I was fortunate to meet Dr. Wang at one point. They did breakthrough stuff with relational databases and that lead me to become a database specialist for the remainder of my career.
I remember the ubiquitous WANG building in Boston. The logo was huge and extended almost the entire width of the building.
Seven years on Wangs made me smile.
@@bobweiram6321 that’s a massive wang …
@@AcornElectron Does sound funny. Working on them prepared me for the PC revolution while all my coworkers were still coding on mainframes.
The utilities, editor, compiler, and debugger were top notch. As was PACE, though it was hobbled by its dependence on DMS/TX rather than being a true RDBMS. But Wang Labs had many good ideas that were ahead of anyone else.
Dear Asianometry, As a young man in my early 20's working for the massive San Francisco Law Firms, I remember the entire floor was the Word Processing floor, it was composed of 30 to 40 women working on IBM Mag Card Selectrics using carbon paper. When the elevator door opened the noise was loud and staggering, and the room was filled with a blue-gray pallor in the air as everyone of the operators smoked ( mostly women of course ). All of that changed.
One day I came to work and was doing a delivery to the Word Processing floor, and as the elevator door opened, the floor was quit, no smoke and almost empty except for 6 or 8 individuals working on these strange large cabinet like things with keyboards and screens, the word WANG was at the top. Fascinated I walked over and watched over the shoulder of one of the operators as they showed me how they could store entire pages of information and move words, sentences, or paragraphs all over the page, They were expensive, but the saved the firm a fortune in wages and benefits, and it was like looking at the future.
What year is your story?
One of the most underrated things of this channel is the stories in the commentaries. Thanks for sharing your experience!
Great times to be a mad man! My dad smoked three packs a day - something no one would do nowadays because there would be no time to work!
Were you shocked by your first exposure to Wang? Did you tell your parents that you were forced to view Wang?
@@bobbydazzler6990 Dude, why recycle the same material on everyone? It's funny once.
So much to say after watching this, so sad that Dr Wang’s dying wish was for his company to be remembered and honored for being founded by an immigrant, I looked up his name at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and they have hardly anything about him. wang should be better remembered. sadly very few people remember this company and even less know it’s founder, even though they went toe to toe with IBM.
one other interesting note besides the invention of core memory, Wang invented the SIMM.
incredible work on this video, as always your videos are so rich with details and nuanced history. I’m blown away. The anecdotes you mention about An Wang, his early history, all the pictures of products, I can’t heap enough praise.
The story about John Cunningham is quite sad too, he is not remembered at all and sadly passed away in 2013. just a sad story all around. I want wait for this video to be public so I can share it. this story needs to be known.
The racism is still here and strong though. Brandon and his bandits are chomping at the bit to war with China whilst at the same time proving how a barbarian too can be so arrogant. Dark days in USA today.
He was a failure, and undeserving of such honour. A crap businessmen who ran his business into the ground through his son.
@@John_Smith_86 This kind of mentality is only going to perpetuate survivorship bias and the misconception that success is easy to achieve and maintain in the tech world. The lapses in judgement by this company's management should be remembered as a lesson on how easy it is to lose everything you built despite early successes.
I think part of the problem is that so many of the computer history folks have been California-centric. There was a lot of work being done in the Route 128 Tech Corridor in Massachusetts and people mostly remember DEC and maybe remember Data General but all of the other companies working there have mostly been ignored by the people focussed on California. Wang, Stratus, and Pr1me seem almost unknown today. And companies like Centurion and Convex out of Texas or any of the midwest manufacturers other than CDC seem to get ignored too.
Not sure how long the name will last but the Wang Theatre is still there in Boston. It used to be called Wang Center now it is a Boch Center/Wang Theatre.
In 1982, I was *privileged* to derive benefits from the 2 Wang Word Processors. Previously we had to proof read the printed papers from IBM Selectric typewriters; and we dreaded changes because that meant that the secretaries had to retype the page itself. With the Wang Word Processors, we could read the text in the CRT and made corrections before being printed. And even after printing, we could make changes and it was so much faster to edit and print again: something that we take for granted nowadays.
The honour of using the Wang Word Processors were only given to the senior secretaries and the junior ones had to wait to learn and use. The reason? Each word processor costs SGD 18k then; and a fresh accounting graduate's monthly salary was only around $1k. LOL
The best WP feature Wang had was the Work page; I hid more than a few documents I knew someone untrained would screw up there. And it was easy to create Glossaries (macros) to work with.
I provided tech support for secretaries working with Wang VS word processing systems. I enjoyed figuring out how to solve advanced document editing and formatting the secretaries wished to implement.
The terminals were weird in the they were connected using dual coax cables.
This made me sad. As a Chinese American who also a Shanghainese, Wang's story is so typical and relatable to many Asian families. The first generation experienced war and hardship, came to the US and worked extremely hard to build up a successful family foundation. I remember hearing my parents talking about Wang labs when they were poor graduate studentsin America. I'm also old enough to grow up poor in China and struggled along side my parents. Forged in hardship, my parents were frugal and shrewed, built up several million in 30 years, and I am successful enough to expand it further. Yet, unlike us, my children are born relatively wealthy, never known hardship. Listening to Wang's story strengthens my worry that their lack the 吃苦奋斗 spirit would eventually undo the labor of two generations. Wang's story illustrates the old Chinese saying 富不过三代, and shows a major flaw of Asian family traditions.
@gius db agreed. That asian family tradition and irrational focus on passing it down the family line is why Wang's story is such a sad but common one. A rational person would pass on the success to people who can best continue it, but we asians are rarely willing to let an "outsider" carry our legacy, until invariably a 败家子 destroys everything the previous generations built.
There's an old saying in Argentina.
The first generation makes the fortune.
The second keeps it.
The third squanders it.
Best wishes.
This story of the rise and fall of this company is also the story of the rise and fall of many other companies and many other projects, endeavors, even families. Passing on a legacy is one of the biggest challenges that any group of invested people have.
@@sjb3460 there is nothing wrong with spelling out one's ethnicity and citizenship. Being an immigrant nation, ethnicity and citizenship coexist naturally. I'm proud to be an American citizen, and I also embrace my Chinese cultural heritage. Political correctness shouldn't be so extreme as to deny different races exist.
@@sjb3460 I do think of myself as an American citizen, and of Chinese ethnicity, hence Chinese American is a perfect clear term, just as African American, Hispanic American, Irish American. I don't know why anyone would have a problem with people liking their ethnicity.
I joined Wang in 1970, working in the QA dept. Sometimes we would get a unit back that did not provide the proper answers, run the diagnostic and it would pass. I started decoding the diagnostic at lunch and Dr. Wang stopped to ask why I was working during lunch, I explained the problem and he said I will check with you tomorrow. The next day he stopped, I explained that I had found the diagnostic problem (never had any programming classes and only a HS graduate) and showed him the difference and explained what I had changed. He asked me to follow him into the research group, introduced me and said I would be the diagnostic programmer for the group. A while later he paid for me to attend Lowell Tech nights to get a degree. I never had a problem understanding him and always enjoyed talking with him. I left in 1972 to join a small startup later purchased by 3M. I am always thankful for Dr. Wang helping me find a great career.
I just found out I have ALS and I want you to know. You are one of the reasons I have to keep living.
I love your content so much. Thanks for all you do here.
try going plant-based, i have heard it helps.
good luck
The only thing I can do is to cheer you up here.Take great care and trust yourself. The life may be different but it's better than flatline.
copypasta is so stupid
Sorry to hear that brutha. Peace
Damn I'd never even heard of Wang labs before today but they must have been formidable. Really sad story, thanks for the excellent content as always.
Thing of all the Wang you've missed out on....
@@bobbydazzler6990 🎁
Wang was a force to be reckoned with at their peak. It's too bad they ended up failing but the tech industry is full of huge companies that ended up dead. DEC, Sun, Compaq... The list is long. Some got bought out before they failed but they wouldn't have survived if they hadn't been bought.
I'm 45, I remember seeing commercials for them on TV as a kid and that they had something to do with computers but really had no idea what they were about.
As someone grew up literally down the road (next town over) from Wang's last HQ in Lowell, appreciated the video and will certainly recommend to share it as a local history in north and northwest suburbs of Boston
However, one thing didn't cover in the video is their philanthropy. Wang An and Lorraine donated to renovate the Wang Theater in Boston and it is still to this date the leading performing arts center in Boston. The Boch family elected to keep the Wang name even after they purchased the naming right
It should be "An and Lorraine Wang". Wang is the surname/family name.
@@RaymondHng duh.... His name is always "Wang An" or "Wong On" in the Chinese community. Family name always goes first for East Asian names in East Asian languages
@@champan250 Yes. But you are writing entirely in English, not in an East Asian language and he is a U.S. citizen, so his Chinese name, 王安, has been Anglicized into English and Western name order as An Wang. You write his wife's name as _Lorraine Wang_ , not as "Wang Lorraine". If he were a Chinese national or Taiwanese national, then Eastern name order would be preserved such as Mao Zedong and Tsai Ing-Wen.
@@RaymondHng exactly what you pointed out..., he didn't have an Anglicized name, so writing his name in Wang An is paying respect to him and to his insistence of not adopting a fake Anglicized name
@@champan250 When he became a naturalized United States, his legal name became An Wang. It has, in fact, been romanized into the Latin alphabet script, not Chinese script.
I was a tech for Wang assigned to the Chicago downtown team. it was the best company I've ever worked for. I've met Dr. Wang several times at Wang Institute Lawrence and several Pride in Service awards. The man was a genius and ahead of his time. I knew when he gave up the realm to Cunningham and his Fred, I knew it was time to go.
I can recall my managers being dumb as heck except Jose and District Manager Rocco who I used to help when he was a tech. My mentor Dave Ros guided a rookie me. I met many good techs, the like of Lenny, this dude named Peterson, John R. O' Malley, William Pickett, Bob D, and many more I can only see their friendly faces on my brain but not their names.
I was the primary tech for Harris Bank, Continental Bank, and Northern Trust Bank.
So you were in a service branch, then. What years?
I worked to Arthur Andersen in Chicago, we ran Wang VS systems, great products.
I knew Rocco too as I worked for the Chicago South group in the Sales group. I worked for Wang from 1980 until they closed the doors in 1993. Saddest day in my career. It was a great company to work for.
Joined Wang in 1978 (before the towers) - it is hard to appreciate, in the moment ,what you were experiencing. I do remember the emotional conversation over whether to stay with the Motorola 68000 chipset and run CPM (and staying proprietary) for PC's versus the Intel 8080 chipset running Q-DOS the forerunner to MSFT DOS and windows - it was the decision that brought them down.. Jobs pulled off what Wang could not on proprietary architecture versus open platform but it took him two tries and he was fired in between those two tries - Wang died on that battlefield long before Jobs won. The video was accurate to the detail - An Wang, Lorraine, Fred, Courtney and Juliette (who I never met) were all driven people, with the right ideas but timing is everything - they were right on the timing for many things but off by 10 years on others. Wang also had major insight into DVX (digital voice messaging) and wang net, a fore-runner to multiplex, multi service communications, using ethernet as a service as well as voice and proprietary band on CATV cable before anyone thought of it - way ahead of its time - they just ran out of gas - but technology owes the family a great debt for their thinking ... the first warriors on any battlefield end up dying, but they also make the most material gains ..
Wow this is very intersting …. I get Nastalgic about technology, I missed it all never paid attention now as a senior I’m catching up and it’s all very intersting to me …
I liked the 68000 except the random panic design decision to disable program counter relative addressing.
I also liked the z80. All they had to do with the z80 was to move it from 8 bit to 16 bit and then from 16 bit to 32 bit, without changing anything else. A multiply instruction maybe the only addition.
And a 32 bit z80 would provide some 64 bit capability.
There has been a history of bad decisions in CPU architectures that has resulted in a few winners and a lot of losers. Sometimes it's been neutral like the ARM64 bit architecture is meh but commercial momentum...
Wang was a pivotal system at my bank employer in the early 1980s, before being surpassed by the whole networked IBM PC environment in the mid-80's. WANG Basic was very well implemented, and it ran DBase II as the foundation for some early custom analytical tools. Thanks for the very interesting and detailed analysis!
I forgot to mention it was also the platform for what I think was called Mailway within the bank, essentially an early interoffice email system.
Yes. Many of the main banks in London used Wang's VS systems.
I arrived in Lowell, Mass in 1975 and lived there for 30 years. I saw first hand the rise and fall of Wang. It was a great addition to the economy of the Lowell area. The tower still stands as a testament to a glorious past.
The pulp research lab where I worked a summer job in 1969 used a Wang calculator to compute a key factor from the tests we ran. It had a keyboard and display unit connected to the main unit that was on an upper floor. Most technicians performed the calculations in steps, writing down and reentering intermediate results. I figured how to use its memory to run it start to finish without breaks.
Wow.... By the tone of your voice we can see (hear) that you were sad by the end of the video....
Dont be sad !
What a honor for him and his family to see such an excellent video !
Keep up the excellent work and may God bless you always !
Technical genius foiled by management hubris. In some ways, it reminds of Kodak's failure to embrace digital photography. A fair reminder that skills and experience are non-transferrable between people or fields of study.
Being born in 1987 I never heard of Wang as a big player, my perception started with IBM, Intel and then AMD. It is simply mindblowing that such a recent pioneer as Wang went under my (and I guess the public's) radar. As always, thank you for the enlightenment.
Boston was a centre for the minicomputer wars, with: DEC, Data General, Wang, Prime, and Apollo amongst the players from the 1960-1980s. That war with IBM, amongst themselves, and eventually with PCs would make an interesting video. . .
As I remember, there was a high concentration of these companies along or near a single state route in the area. A google search says this was Route 128. Some died out because they didn't transition to including microcomputers/PC's like DEC, Wang, and Data General. I'm not sure what happened to the others. It would have been nice to have this area continue its high tech industries.
@@palmercolson7037 As the MINIcomputer market was winding down, Data General was pivoting towards other markets, including the growing storage market.
EMC acquired Data General principally for DG's mid-sized storage systems. EMC was weak in that space so it was an important deal.
A lot of the DG staff continued working for EMC and DG shareholders got paid out. That was a better exit than a lot of the competition experienced.
Sun and SGI (Silicon Graphics) was also part of this war. I remember a Sun replacing the Apollo workstation on my desk.
Ah, memories. I was an engineer at DEC... Knew Edson @ Data General very well... Ex wife worked for Somerville Lumber programming their Wang computer... And I'm close friends with the founder of Apollo ( who previously worked at Prime )! And that doesn't even mention all the supercomputer companies! Thinking Machines, Alliant, Kendall Square... Lots was going on around Route 128 back then!
@@paulcantrell01451 Where did all that talent and knowledge go? Not long ago,, some Minicomputer makers were quite vertically integrated, with component production & assembly around Boston.
There's a book I have about an at the time competing company, Norsk Data, and it has a quite grave 1991 bullet point which reads "ND suffers the same fate as Wang, terminating in-house development of the last of their remaining own products".
ND also went belly-up in 1992, after this book was published. There is a striking similarity in how both these two giants crumbled to dust in a record-short time, from the rise of open standards in professional computing (book not only mention PCs, but also puts great emphasis on UNIX-machines and in general standards from the likes of ISO, DIN and ANSI).
There is a video coming about Norsk Data.
Great piece on Wang Labs. I hope we see a segment on Tandem Computers one day.
Ah good old Tandem. That would be a good story for sure.
I worked for Unigate Dairies and they couldn't afford Tandem computers to provide high availability to dozens of distribution sites around the UK. So we programmed high availability into the application software instead using redundant Datapoint systems. It worked!! Good job the Datapoint 'whizzy' hard drives were very unreliable.
I AM STILL VERY PROUD BEEN A MEMBER OF THE WANG COMPUTERS (NOT WONG)!
IT IS NOT ONLY SAD BUT HEARTBREAKING.
WITH LOADS OF COMMENTS HERE & EMPLOYEE HISTORIES, HEARTS BLEED.
WANG LAB INC & DR AN WANG ARE BIG LEGENDs .
I HAD “MISCARRIAGE” DUE TO MUCH DEDICATION TO MY WORK.
Ken Olson was one of my neighbors on Governors Island in Lake Winnipesaukee. As a Laconia High School student at the time I remember Ken explaining sad tales of Digital Computer and what was going on. Dr. Wang visited a few times he was friendly but hard at the same time. What an era to live through ... it was 1970
Ken olsen’s brother worked with me at bell telephone labs in murray hill nj during the late sixties.
@@Oliveras1943 They are a good family and very talented. I wish Digital had gone better for him.
As to digital going better for Mr. O, I would say only this after having worked there for five years: beware matrix management that you manipulate furiously from behind the scenes, all while claiming you don't have a hand in decision-making. Eventually you wind up with a system that will ignore and work around you, and then break your sword off at the haft as you try to change it. Ask Ken, he knows.
I remember a media interview with Ken. They asked 'How many people work for Digital'? He thought for a moment and replied, "About half.". There was a phrase that went around DEC that went: If you get to work late you have to leave early to make up for it. To which I added, "especially if you took a long lunch.".
I work for WANG Singapore from 1980 to 1986 and been to Boston in 1982 for the Achievers Meeting. Great company to work for.
My first job out of college in 1984 was inside Berklee School of Music and i was just a lackey but i remember the day they took my IBM Selectric out and put me in front of the Wang Word Processor and IBM AT machines to "type into". The "IT" person who theyu brought in (there was no word for "IT" yet so they just called her "The Wang girl" (LOL) carried a Wang "laptop" which she carried in a wheeled suitcase because it was huge but she was like a rock star. The Wang did a great job with words and it inspired me to begin a career as a journalist, then copywriter and I ended up as a lead reviewer for WIRED and Macworld and was first in covering the iPhone when it launched. I met Jobs, Woz, and though i never met Wang, i did walk past the Wang Building every morning at South Station in Boston on my way to Berklee.
I started out with Wang word processing computers back in the early to mid '80's and they transformed the typing the world. Prior to Wang, it is possible one would have to re-type 80 pages or so of a document due to the addition/change of one single word. Suddenly editing, copying, saving, printing and even document sharing was possible. Nothing but grateful thanks to Mr. Wang from this longtime typist.
When a company is founded on the genius, drive, and vision of one person, rarely is there a replacement found when that person steps down from leadership. The rest is history.
Maybe I'm mistaken but I seem to recall at the time of the Wang Word Processor, the company's pitch was for the "Paperless Office." It was a very powerful concept. Also I had an engineer friend win a Wang PC through a company contest and I recall he was not crazy about the machine. It is all ancient history now.
Yes, and my mother told me about the future of “cloud computing” that was coming…this was in like 1979.
The paperless office was a Big Deal at that time. ISTR that the commercials talked about that. They wanted to integrate Voice, Data, and Word processing.
The Wang PC was engineered better than the IBM PC at the time. It was faster (8086, not 8088), and all the plug-in cards were self-identifying, something that would be a long time coming on the IBM PC.
The big problem with it was that it generally wasn't compatible with the IBM and so got left in the dust, something that others saw well before Wang did, unfortunately.
We now have Paperless Statements with our bills.
I got into UT Austin when I said I wanted to go to MIT at the start of high school. UT Austin is a perfectly fine school, but my parents still think it's crap. That's the problem with Asian parenting, you get a 95 on the test and they're mad at you because you didn't get 100.
The problem is that Asian parents value you based on your academic achievements rather than loving you as a person and for what you can do to make your friends' lives better.
@@nyanpasu64 No the problem is they grew up in a time when where you went to school mattered. Today not so much anymore. Maybe it might matter more if you wanted an academic career, but not for normal careers.
@@nyanpasu64 it kinda digusting that there are many people in this comment section said Wang failure was because he didn't treat his son harsh enough, jesus
Asian parents grew up in a time and place where age equates to wisdom and status. That doesn't translate to a place like America where prosperity is best sought through youthful experimentation and market disruption.
6:12 "If you don't like name of company, you go work for company you like name better!" 👏👏👏
When you're a visionary who struggles a bit with English, but you still have a blunt point to get through. Love this man.
Outstanding (and very sad for the ones we went thru it). I started working with Wang Computers (the 2200) in 1976 in Caracas, Venezuela. Then I came in 1984 to work in the Lowell Towers. Now my story..! READ IT because it could cause a different outcome for wang. So, here you go.
I was working on the 4th Floor in the 3rd Tower (the newest one), and around 6:30pm, a hardware engineer showed Dr. Wang an advanced prototype of a Wang PC cloned with the Intel 8088 (the original that IBM PC had). Dr. Wang was fuming! that we were cloning IBM, and he told the engineer that 'he would never do that!'. So we (at Wang) developed a Wang PC with a more advanced Intel processor (8086) and created our own BIOS, so we (Wang) would be better, faster, and unique than the original IBM PC. Could we follow the PC clone industry? We could have a Word Processor for the PC! (Multimate did it).
Dr. Wang was a brilliant mind but terrible at choosing people under him. He created an organigram of loyal Chinese friends.
I have been trying unsuccessfully to find info about this after watching your video, but my mother had some recollection about An Wang being on a Chicago expo or fair floor for the Wang Laboratories booth even after being diagnosed with cancer. A real embodiment of enterprise and entrepreneurship.
I first became aware of WANG in 1972 via my wife, who after graduation as a math/CS major had gone to work (as receptionist / secretary) in the Trust Department of a Washington, DC bank. She used a WANG calculator for tasks like computing bond yields and convinced them to buy her a WANG 2200, writing interactive BASIC programs for the same tasks. She also moonlighted at a company which created 2200 based turn-key systems.
A few years later in 1979 after working as photographer and photo lab tech at National Geographic I went to work at a magazine printer where I was promoted from production troubleshooter, planner then production manager. I discover the company used a WANG 2200 dual 8” floppy computer as part of turn-key printing estimating system and started staying in the evenings after the estimator who used it went home to teach myself how to program in BASIC, developing some programs to solve printing planning tasks like pagination and calculating page layouts for the presses. Then armed with those programs I did a demo for upper management making a pitch for the then new eight user WANG 2200 MVP system to create a job status tracking and billing system.
On the MVP up to eight “dumb” terminals consisting CRT and keyboard were connected via I/0 boards to a central CPU which ran on an 8-bit microprocessor on a time share basis. It was one of the first, if not the first, microcomputers which used a main-frame style hard disk unit the size of a small filing cabinet which contained a 14” fixed and 14” removable 5MB platters. Printing was done using a high-speed band printer attached to the CPU. There was no disk operating system, just a set of BASIC commands WANG added to BASIC to read and write variables to the disk. It was also designed with the intention of having the eight users running eight different programs not for sharing data between them. Each terminal only had 28k Bytes of memory for running the programs.
I created my job tracking DB by figuring out I could create and write a two dimensional alpha-numeric variable $A(x,y) which contained four 56 byte records to fit each 256 byte sector on the disk which allowed me to read and write records by sector / record number. Because there was no DOS, much less a multi-user one, I had to devise my own way via flipping a bit in the sector header to lock out other users to prevent overwriting files and created my own indexing and binary search routines for searches and sorts.
At one point I did a demo of what I was doing to the WANG sales team thinking I might convince them to hire me as an instructor but they didn’t seem understand the potential of how I was sharing data between users and how it would allow a computer-savvy manager to kept track of job status and productivity from their desktop, which was one of my goals as production manager when designing the system. The company also didn’t see the potential but another I demo’d my system to did and in 1980 offered me 20% more to to become its systems manager to develop a similar job estimating/status tracking/billing system on a DEC PDP11/44 it used for general accounting.
In 1980 I had also seen help wanted ad placed by the US Information Agency seeking printing production managers for its overseas publishing centers. I applied and interviewed but nothing came of it until 1982 when I got a call from them wanting me to interview again. I took the job and became a foreign service printing specialist. I discovered that USIA used WANG WPS and VS units and made a pitch to get access to a machine I could run the software I had already developed which I had stored on 14” disk and develop new applications. But the IT managers, none of them who knew how to code, vetoed the request. Undaunted I went down the street to Radio Shack and purchased a TRS 80 Model 100 “laptop” which I carried back and forth to work in the top case of my Honda GL500 “Silverwing” motorcycle and took with me overseas to Manila in 1983 when assigned there as production manager. I didn’t get my hands on a Agency issued PC which was equipped with LOTUS 1-2-3 until 1984, which is when I switched to developing macro driven Lotus spreadsheet databases.
In 1987 I got into another battle with the IT bureaucrats over purchasing Macs for typesetting and page layout. They controlled all IT purchasing and blocked the request. We won that battle by convincing upper management that Macs where graphic arts workstations not computers. Around 1990 I got a copy of Filemaker Pro for the Mac and started developing multi-user applications using it while performing my regular management duties, then as the admin. officer of the Manila Center where I rans a ethernet network of about twenty macs which performed production tasks like typesetting and page layout and all the administrative functions using shared Filemaker database applications I created.
USIA and the State Department had invested heavily in centralized WANG VS systems and into the early 1990s were still installing WANG VS terminals running contractor produced software that wasn’t user friendly. By then in our printing center every keystroke generated, including drafts of e-mails, was done in Filemaker databases which allowed me to manage from my desktop, just as I had envisioned back in 1979 when I made the pitch to get my WANG MVP system.
You are very smart and able do great work.
The WANG BASIC of 2200s and MVPs was a criminally atrocious programming language.
@@borisborcic I can’t argue with that because I was a printing production manager wanting to use a computer to solve problems like job tracking and estimating on my own, not a programmer. At the time the dumb terminal CRT / keyboard wasn’t capable of much more than the BASIC commands could execute. The advantage of interactive BASIC for me was the ability to write and run code incrementally without needing to compile it.
Wang Labs was a key to the success of Shugart Associates, where I worked. It was a major customer for floppy disk drives, and the pioneering customer for the 8 inch hard drive, paying $5000 each for a 2 platter 10MB 8-inch drive.
The success stories in tech come down to pairing a world-class genius like Dr. Wang with the businesspeople that can manage it. He clearly had a world-class sales team, but got himself too involved in R&D to the pointof not being able to hand it off.
This is a very common refrain in tech, of having a visionary founder but no control over the employees. Those who succeed are always the one where the tech and the business side can look at each other with mutual respect and trust.
Like Apple.
My grandfather worked for a Wang competitor. He thought Wang's switch to office word processing was a killer as it was low hanging fruit for the rest of the industry.
I do remember the tail end of the story back when I was a kid, reading about it. There are a lot of managers who believe they are indispensable but there are really only a handful that truly are. Nobody could replace him so nobody did. And, once the IBM PC became the standard it was all over for such specialized and expensive products as Wang produced. His wife's attitude towards their sons education sounds almost a cliché of the immigrant Chinese family. It must've been a difficult environment in which to grow up.
Don't forget the clones. Yes, IBM getting into the PC market, made PCs a legitimate business tool, but affordable clones, and more importantly PC compatible clones moving up to the 386, when IBM balked, opened them to the masses.
I got into electronics, when dedicated proprietary systems, were still in vogue. Back in 1979, both Tektronix (8002, 8550/8560) and HP (64000) made proprietary development systems, for making microprocessor based product. Everything from the whole computer, including their own proprietary OS, to the emulator pod, that plugged into your target (your prototype) hardware. These units cost $10s of thousands. By the mid 1980s, competitors came out with just emulator pods, that plugged into a PC, by way of a serial port (COM1, COM2, ...) and cost in the $5000 range. By the late 1990s, you could get a USB plug in ISP for $35.
That part reminded me of a system analysis class I had in 1994 in which my professor maintained that PCs had no value for businesses and mainframes were the only worthwhile business system.
@@DanielleWhite these days people had same attitudes towards tablets like iPads. I must admit, I was one of them too.
Sad story, I remember Wang machines being competitors to Nixdorf machines in Europe back in the day, never knew the backstory so thanks for telling it.
I had forgotten about Nixdorf. Thank You for the memory jog.
@@JeanPierreWhite Still exists as a brand-name incredibly enough, Wincor-Nixdorf, they make ATMs and the like
Very Interesting. As a Chemical Engineering student in the early 1970's we had a Chemical Process laboratory that required significant calculating capabilities for the experiments. To support this, we had a Wang Lab which had some type of CPU with several small terminals connected to it. We had access to an IBM mainframe but, at this time, this required punch cards to program it and wasn't really suitable to support most of the process lab experiments. Also we were still using slide rules for a lot of stuff... I had a Post Versa log. A couple significant events occurred during my time there. First, primarily the computer science and math majors started using dumb terminals for most of their programming. This was the beginning of the end of the cumbersome punch card programing. Secondly, a colleague of mine that had access to more money than most of us bought an HP35 calculator. We all know where this led, and I suppose spelled the beginning of the end of some of the Wang Products, not to mention the end of the slide rule industry.
Thank you for this! I did work experience @ Wang when I was 15 years old in 1985 in Perth, Western Australia - I thoroughly enjoyed working there - it set me up for a career working in IT. I've often wondered what happened to Wang... now I know!
I worked for Wang '79 to '94 and suggest An Wang's book "Lessons" (easily found). It could well hold the key as to why our PC was not software compatible with I B M.
The computer space is brutal and unforgiving. I remember companies coming and going monthly in the 70's-90's. Dr. Wang did better than most men.
Excellent documentary. I had interviewed at Wang Labs back in the 70s and was even introduced to Dr. Wang himself during the interview, apparently part of his approach of overseeing all aspects of the company. I didn't get hired. But ironically, some time later, was hired by CompuGraphic. I never knew, until watching this documentary, that Wang Labs was a critical part of getting Compugraphic started.
I was hired into the R&D department at Compugraphic as a software engineer and was there for three years before it finally dawned on me that Compugraphic really had no idea what to do with software engineers. They manufactured, big, clunky typesetting machines and just didn't understand the growing field of software engineering. The only developments in the R&D department that had any chance of becoming products or parts of products were those developed by the hardward people in the R&D lab.
Over the year there were an average of 6 software engineers (with fairly high turnover) and none of us were ever given an actual project to work on. The attitude was basically, "Go ahead, just play around with things", but no actual leadership at all. The overall company's official attitude was "We're not an industry leader, we're a fast follower". At one point the company brought in a consultant, apparently in an attempt to shake things up, and the most he did was establish a catch-phrase for the comp[any, namely "Do it right the first time". I never figured out how that was supposed to accomplish anything, especially in the R&D department.
Their most succesful year, at least in terms of profit, was when they sold off some nearby property, with that sale constituting the major part of their profits. In 1987, Compugraphic was acquired by European competitor Agfa-Gevaert and the buildings and land in Wilmington, Massachusetts sold off. Compugraphic basically simply ceased to exist.
I would love to see Asionometry do a documentary about Compugraphic.
I worked at a major printing company in Nashville, Tennessee, the now defunct Baird-Ward, in early 1983. When I started, they were beginning to replace Compugraphic equipment with Agfa-Gevaert and the Apple Lisa computers for typesetting. The Lisa computers were replaced by the Macintosh Plus in 1985. Before I left in 1990, new state of the art Agfa-Gevaert typesetters and Macintosh II computers were installed.
@@mistermac56 One of the very few interesting things that happened while I was in the R&D department of Compugraphic was that we purchased one of the, then brand new just-on-the-market, Apple Lisa computers and got to play with it. There was no actual objective in acquiring it, no plans for it, but it was something to play with. The Lisa had only incredibly crude graphics capabilities, definitely no animation, but I found a little trick to make it at least LOOK like something dynamic was happening graphically. I got it to show a ball bouncing across the screen. Yeah, not much at all by today's standards, but pretty cool at the time. I would leave it with the bouncing ball running on it and people walking by would stop, fascinated by what it was doing, and no one else figured out how I had done it.
I spent several years working on the Wang 2200 with their version of interpreted Basic 2. Wang had 40,000+ dedicated customers for this easy to program, easy to troubleshoot, easy to implement platform. This was a good sized market share in those days. But when they moved to their bigger and better machine and discontinued the 2200, they provided no upgrade path. They never ported Basic 2 to the new platform. In my estimation, that was the major reason for their downfall. By the time they brought back the 2200 several years later, huge numbers of their customers had moved off of Wang hardware to use NIAKWA Basic 2 on a PC network and never looked back. They never did port Basic 2 to their bigger hardware.
"The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder gives an insider's view of minicomputer development at Data General (and the Boston area in general). It is a classic tech management book and a fun read. My grandfather was there and knew almost everyone in the book. He said, the book overall was pretty faithful to the culture and environment.
Today, the "Dasher" keyboard colour schemes are popular choices for mechanical keyboard aficionados.
funny, didn't know that was a book, I recognized "Soul of a New Machine" as the title of an album by techno-metal band Fear Factory
I worked at Wang Labs in Lawrence, and eventually at Wang Europe in Brussels as a curriculum developer and technical instructor for the operating systems internals of their OIS and VS product lines. Great experience, particularly living and working in Belgium, but it was also disheartening to feel the company falling apart and being helpless to do anything but go down with it. It was small consolation to know that the other hi-tech giants such as Digital and Data General had also failed to understand the potential of PCs and they all went down about the same times.
Family businesses can only grow so far until they fail. Eventually, you have to extend your sphere of trust beyond family boundaries.
Wow! My mother worked for them for like 30 years, and I cut my teeth on programming on Wang machines from a young age. I decided I wanted to own a software company, and that actually happened, though not as I expected (the company JAST USA popularized English translated Hentai visual novels).
Peter Payne if your mother is Linda, she was my mentor!!! Abbie Morrison here - I worked with her first in Rockville and then in San Diego. She was one of the most awesome people I have ever met in my life. Sending love to you and your family.
In 1986 I worked for a firm in Las Vegas that used a Wang stand alone word processing unit. It was OK, but there were two things about it that really bothered me. We were doing scientific work, and much of it included math calculations. The machine could do sub-scripts and super-scripts. You know, a number squared has a "2" above the number, just after it. That's a super script. Sub-script was the same thing, but below the line. BUT THE MACHINE COULD NOT DO BOTH ON THE SAME LINE!!! If you did a super-script on a line and then tried to sub-script another number, the later number just came out level with the line. Same thing in reverse. Because of this, we couldn't use the machine very much. The OTHER problem was the built-in spell checker. The word "WANG" came out as a spelling error! I grant that this was an early generation machine, and otherwise it was great to work with, but why?
😂 They definitely got better, but there were a few quirky typographic issues in almost every system at the time! 😎✌️
wang not??! (Orientals have an informal grasp of English).
I worked as a programmer on Wang VS systems for AT&T. They also needed Super and Sub Scripts for preparing rate tarrifs. We had hundreds of people in typing pools using the systems. I ended up developing custom Xerox telecommunications print drivers in Zerox's printer language, Xix or Zix I think it was called, so you could do both super and sub on one line and print on Xerox printers by communication with 2400 baud modems. Saved a ton of money too since Zerox printers were so much cheaper than Wang printers.
you didnt buy the super wang
Great story 💫✅👍
I remember when one of our departments got a Wang word processor in 1981 which made abstract submission documentation easy. It cost me a fortune in presents to the secretaries, but it was worth it in time saved.
I remember seeing those commercials as a kid. Neat. I liked seeing the screen shot of Atari BASIC.
I started my WP career on Wang Labs, one of the best systems I've ever had the pleasure to work on. We had them at the WTC for several years. The last program we used on it was LBM Galley, then replaced them with PCs. Worked on a Wangwriter 2236DE Interactive Emulator but the OS system I had the most fun on. Such a shame they didn't last.
An excellent history. As you said the problems went way beyond Fred Wang. Not many of the proprietary minicomputer makers - DEC, Prime, Norsk Data, Data General, etc., survived 1992! The market had just moved on to much better value workstations - whose lunch in turn got eaten by PCs in the early 00s.
Thank you! I asked you to make a video about Wang Labs last year. You delivered.
Very interesting. I was one of three individuals at Blue Cross of California that built their giant Word Processing Center in Woodland Hills, CA. In 1975 I was tasked with replacing the IBM word processing machines with "something more productive." After a long investigation, I chose the Wang Word Processing System. Our Center at Blue Cross was staffed with over 120 employees on 3 shifts, so the equipment investment was enormous. Because we were one of Wang's biggest customers, I often visited An Wang at his headquarters in Lowell, Massachusetts. The reason I mention that is because the executives at Blue Cross, including myself, at many, many in person meetings, pronounced Dr. Wang's name like "bang", not "wong". I was never corrected in how I pronounced his, and his company's name in any of those meetings. Where did you find the pronunciation you used?
I worked at Aranda center! Much later than you as well. Ive been in that data center. That building is empty now.
From his Chinese name 王安 Wáng Ān, which is most correctly pronounced "wong" with a rising tone English speakers usually hear as a question mark. To differentiate between the two better (even though they are intimately linked), perhaps the narrator could pronounce "wong?" for the man and "wang!" for the company as it was known on the market.
I am 38 and work in IT. Somehow I never came across any hints this company and it's hardware. Just wow. This is the discovery of the day. What a vivid example of hereditary mindset shortcomings.
I work in public sector IT, which suffers from "fiscal responsibility" compliances and other considerations that gum up the procurement process. While there's no Wang equipment around anymore, I have occasionally found Wang branded mousepads and the like, and older coworkers have mentioned swapping out old Wang terminals.
Many companies in Boston's route 128 + missed the PC revolution. President of Digital famously said the world needed 3 PCs. That's partly why we hear of Silicon Valley not Route 128. It sad to hear about Wang's end. Its family drama no doubt make for an interesting story.
Wang Labs was on I-495... Tewksbury and Lowell
@@champan250 Yes it was that's why 128+. 😺
Thank you for a great little doco - such an interesting story. Seems like Dr Wang had his heart set on a family business in an industry that quickly changed and relied on outside influence. A sad fall from grace but an important lesson.
I always like when your videos show up in my subscriptions. Thanks for the quality content and the quantity of uploads. Very impressive.
Thanks for putting this together.
My family worked for Wang for over a decade, and the tragedy of An Wang’s mistakes were always plain to see, but culturally, they couldn’t break the Asian mould (speaking up when the ships on fire… or even when it’s leaking).
My uncle’s trajectory at Wang R&D was similar, bc he was an engineering prodigy finishing his Elect Eng degree at 16, and like An Wang didn’t have the social skills and nous to see the writing on the wall and deal with poor management, he almost survived to the bitter end to 91, but there’s serendipity. … he retrained as a wealth manager in Hong Kong/China/Australia, developed his social skills and never looked back.
"Nous"?
I remember working on a Wang 2200 as a young construction engineer. Later I worked for the company that designed the software. It ran on a Wang 2200 using the Basic-2 language. By the time I got there, they were transitioning to PC's using a Niakwa Compiler.
Time flies.
So interesting to see these old photos of Shanghai, including JiaoTong University. Some of those buildings still stand on campus.
The old saying about traditional Chinese businesses not being able to last 3 generations certainly rings true in this story.
Three generations of Wang is too much for any woman (or man).
Nepotism never work.
@@bobbydazzler6990😂😂
I worked the last 5 or so years of my career in the building that had originally been the Wang Towers, now the Cross Point building in Lowell MA, three 12-story towers. For a while, you could still make out the faded Wang name at the top.
Once that general-purpose PCs incorporated word-processing functions, the writing was on the wall for Wang and standalone word processors. Also, Wang had lucrative patent rights on core memory that was at one time the only game in town, but that ran out and got eclipsed by newer memory technology.
Wang played a part in the history and development of high-tech, so can be proud of that. They had a good run. The churn, change and evolution is part of the game. Companies do not really die so much as their people disperse and reconfigure for new and better things.
The 1st National Geographic article on Silicon Valley in 1980 had an advertisement of Wang this continued till 1986, after which it somehow fell off the map
My mother was a secretary pool member in the early to mid 80s, and when things started converting from electric typewriters (including selectrics) to computers, WPS support still had some demand. The majority of the pool moved to wordperfect. There might have been some residual wordstar users, but I don't recall anybody using Word.
Are you saying that your mom didn't get any experience with Wang at work?
Microsoft word will be dead as it is too hard to use and expensive, it will gebreplaced by AI
@@X001W19 Word is hard to use? Ha ha ha! Maybe if you are a small child who has never seen a computer. 🤣🤣🤣🤡
Curious where you got so much of the history? was it through the book “Riding the runaway horse’.?
I grew up in North Billerica, next to Lowell Massachusetts. There was a big Wang office. Thanks for this video, I never knew any of this before watching.
The title unfortunately tells everything. Sad. 😢 Thanks for the documentaries. You’re my hero on this stuff
Early in my career I was looking after an IBM mainframe but I also acquired responsibility for a Wang VS system running the organisation's word processing. I knew nothing about Wang at the start, but there was a great wall of VS documentation, so I started reading it. After a while, I was outraged - this Wang system could do so much! It had fantastic facilities. And we were only using it for word processing. It seemed like a waste, a travesty. I read Kenney's book Riding the Runaway Horse, a history of Wang Laboratories, and developed a huge respect for Dr Wang, too. Sadly it was around that time that Wang started to decline, there was no future in pushing Wang. Eventually word processing switched to PCs, and the Wang system was sold, more or less for scrap. Sad. I never lost my admiration for Dr Wang, though - a true pioneer.
Yes! I have been waiting for this. Thank you for this!
You've been waiting for Wang? Okay...
I worked at Wang Labs in R&D in Chelmsford, Ma and it was the best company I’ve ever worked.
As a computer geek in high school An Wang held Hero status with a lot of us. It was sad to see the news back then of the companies demise. His death in 92 seemed to be the end of an era. Thanks for posting. This brough back a lot of memories.
I worked for DEC from mid 80's to 1992 when I was laid off, then for a year at an annoying telemarketing company that used 6 Wang VS systems to run the auto-dialers and manage call lists. I managed the IT dept. for our location and one day after returning from lunch the door to the computer room was open and there was a fan in the doorway. There had been some air conditioning failure and no one had time to page me. I barely got the words out of my mouth to shut everything down before systems started crashing and the large removable disks started having head crashes. The company started switching over to DEC VAXes after that. I left and went back to work for DEC as a consultant just before their demise. I loved working for DEC, but it was still rewarding working with the Wang systems. I was never aware of the history, but thanks to this impressive video I now do. Interestingly I recently ran into a woman working at Target in California who had a New England accent. I remarked I used to work for DEC and she said she used to work as an assembler for Wang.
Literally EVERYBODY that worked at DEC, loved it. signed, #118138
The Wang 3300 was the first "real" computer I had a chance to program in high school. Loading the BASIC system from paper tape took FOR.EVER, but as a tech-geek high schooler in the days before personal computers this was the hottest thing that was available to me. Taught me a lot, had a lot of fun with it. Thanks, Dr. Wang.
What a brilliant life. Regardless of what happened to WANG Labs. Wang the Man, is the epitome of quiet guines and overcoming any an all adversity by self confidence and will .
A PhD in 13 months? Man, those were the days. Now your first two years are just in prelim classes.
In 1981 my wife and I bought an Amstrad computer with a plug in modem not requiring the phone handpiece to be hung on it.
All memory and software was stored on little 100mm floppies holding about 110 K.
The CRT, keyboard two drives and computer was one unit with a separate fast and clean dot matrix printer.
I liked that it was menu driven and much nicer than the DOS IBM PC.
Although only 128K ram the OS was undemanding and it was not slow for the day..
Processing power and speed improved rapidly and we bought a second one, games, spreadsheets, educational and special programs from other suppliers were compatible.
They were good for sending faxed word processor documents from the modem.
They cost about $!000 each and the floppies were a few bucks.
We both used them for business and professional writing.
As time went on they lost out to the much more popular IBM clones even before the windows OS, we eventually had to join the mob.
I still have both of the Amstrads, printer and floppies in storage and some day soonish will carefully boot them up.
that's a sad story. i think i remember the commercial for some reason from early eighties even though i would've been like 4. the failed before i finished school. i could feel your sadness by the end, a very fitting title for such a pioneering person and company.😢
I was there as a field systems engineer from late 79 to 89 in Australia and saw it all from boom to bust. The difference was that when the end started in the US in 85-86, Australia was booming. Full steam ahead. We had just won the largest computer contract ever in the southern hemisphere, installing VS 100s with craploads of workstations and peripherals and TC in federal dole offices all over the country, followed up by another federal contract to install networked (original) PCs in all federal government DSS "Jobcenters", of which there was one in every town with more than a few thousand people. I was on the project teams for both contracts and spent a very memorable time flying all around the country for 18 months and doing solo road-trips of 2,500 kms. They were the fat days. I was young and single and used only my Per Diem for months on end as hotels and other stuff while traveling was on the company card and those paychecks went straight into the bank. Great internal management style. By far the best computer company I worked for in my career. I made lifelong friends and run a page for ex Wang Australian Alumni. Their product lead times were too slow when companies were moving from years to mere months in the conception/development to market times.
Another amazing video! I really like the balance of the tech, administrative and biographical details... Thank you Asianometry!
Excellent presentation, thanks. I visited Wang HQ in Lowell in February 1980 from the UK. My firm had one Wang WP machine. I lost track of Wang's path after that, until now. Its decline began or showed soon after our visit, so an extremely interesting film.
In the 90s I worked as a contractor and the client had a Wang, actually more than one. At first I thought they were kidding, it turns out they refused to upgrade. They were buying the stuff others were tossing out. Dell started support around 2000ish. They had us certified for y2k like 30 times and they were on Wang 🤷♂️. I moved end of 2004, so might still be using it 😉.
My first interview (didn’t get job, must have been 16) was for programming cobol on a Wang office system. Would have been ‘85. In ‘91 first computer job was getting a bunch of 286 pc clones in an office, with coax network and Novell server. Then to program FoxPro for customer DB. Got a call in 2000, they were still using it all!
It sounds like you weren't comfortable touching the old Wang. Did you eventually overcome this hurdle and love the Wang?
YEah, I once worked at a University that was using Ungerman-Bass ethernet over cable TV rigid coax as a backbone. WHen the company went out of business, they were buying replacement gear at auctions from everyone else who was scrapping it... 5 Mbit ethernet :) What dopes. Hopefully they have gotten better, but I doubt it...
The fourier transform! That is the piece I missed again and again to really understand how the image is formed!!! Finally
Great history lesson on WANG. Worked for Northrop in IT Network Services from 85 to 89. We had a huge WANG distributed word processing network. Recall seeing my first ever one gigabyte hard drives being installed in our WANG server. We had old time IBM mainframes, DEC and HP Super Minis as well. Installed a fiber optic backbone and switched almost all of the IBM, DEC and HP terminals to twisted pair through a Northern Telecom switch/frame using baluns.
The WANG systems were so cool. A predecessor to today’s email. Then, along came the PC and word processing s/w, along with the ability to network them via twisted pair through the phone network; which ended the WANG Dynasty.
Dr Wang has been my hero. He hired me @20yrs old, just as vp/mvp/ois/vs we're under development. He was a caring father figure to me, insured I received both mentoring and education daily. Courtney and I used to play baseball on the weekends. Wang Labs prepared me to become principle engineer at Tektronix, and finish my career as chief engineer at HP. I would never achieved this without the Wang experience
Thank you so much Father Wang
Wang did a great job selling VS computers to the US Air Force to run Civil Engineering and Services. I encountered them first in 1990, learning about disk packs and reel-to-reel tape.
Eventually it was replaced with a "Wang" PC Server, and then others like Dell after that.
I used to fix Wang ( control data brand ) 300MG hard drives when they crash. Today they have a freaking SSD drive the size of my pinkie.
My older coworkers remember upgrading out of Wang equipment. We still sometimes find a random Wang branded mousepad.
As with your other videos, this was a fascinating deep dive. I don't have any exciting memories of The Doctor or working for Wang, but I do fondly remember in the mid 1980s using what I believe were 2436 DE and 2536 DW terminals at my fist job in Toronto. The place was all Wang, but within a couple of years, they were phased out for Microsoft and Apple machines. Never knew the story of Wang till now.
I hadn’t even heard of Wang before. It’s amazing how many companies died off as the computer industry emerged.
As a pupil and teenager I had access to an "old" Wang 2200. I cannot recall if it ever was turned on, as I cannot remember the big box under the desk that was required to run it, but I really loved the keyboard, made from clear plastic caps and a paper layer underneath on which the letters were printed. I found the touch and feel was much better than of any home computer of the era or the C.Itoh 101e terminals we used for lectures and exams.
I love your videos not only for its content, but also you inserted jokes here and there such as photo of Chongqing in 1945 and 6.9 million caption haha. Wish you all the best!
Thanks for this video. I worked at Wang, first in the word processing R&D group in Lowell in 1977 before Wang had built the three towers and had casual interactions with Dr. Wang several times. I was subsequently in the marketing side in Asia and in other offices such as in New Orleans till I was let go in the early 90s. It was probably the best experience I had in my entire career, even though financially my naive strategy of putting most of my assets in Wang stock was an expensive financial lesson.
Another fantastic video. Thank you Asianometry!
The analysts from 14:14 are right!!! Texas instrument still sells its ti 84 plus calculators with z80’s for 100 here in europe at least.
Fascinating! I’ve always wondered why that company disappeared. I remember it from the 70s & 80s.
Back in college during the mid 1980's we had several WANG machines that did word processing and basic. I was a student and computer operator of that machine. The good old days. We also have DEC 10s and it was the early days off PC's.
DECSystem-10... Still my favorite machine to program of all time!!!
Never heard of Wang Calculators before until now. Thanks so much!
In the 80s the first office computer they trained me to use was word processing on VS65. Eventually I learned 'Wang Decision Processing' language, procedure language, and became the Wang system administrator for two VS65 systems that supported a staff of about 40 users. It was a great experience for me as the technology of the day was not that complicated, and thankfully the very well built equipment would rarely go down. Sure hated when we did have problems as I would basically live at company while switching users and files between our two systems to keep part of the production cycle moving - while the downed system was being repaired. I was glad to have had that experience.
I worked for Wand from 1984 till 1989 In service then in sales. Some of the greatest co workers and memories I have had in my career. Your legacy is safe Dr. Wang.