Wang Laboratories

The Wang Laboratories was a computer company founded in 1951 by An Wang. Seats of the company were Cambridge, Massachusetts ( 1954-1963 ), Tewksbury, Massachusetts ( 1963-1976 ) and Lowell, Massachusetts (1976 to 1992). At their peak in the eighties, the company recorded annual revenues in the amount of three billion dollars and employed over 30,000 employees.

History

The company has always been guided by Wang, took the direct impact on the business and product strategy. Therefore, both successes and failures of the company must be attributed to him. In 1992, the company filed for bankruptcy. The quite impressive Wang Towers are located directly at the Lowell Connector, the junction of Route 3 toward Lowell, Massachusetts. These were the company headquarters to insolvency. They were then auctioned at a relatively low price of $ 500,000.

Wang made ​​sure that his family would retain control over his company after the IPO. He gave preference shares (Class B stocks ) with higher dividends, but out only one-tenth of the voting rights. While the public mostly referring such shares, the Wang family retained the ordinary shares. The Wang shares were first traded on the New York Stock Exchange, but since the procedure with division of the shares did not meet the local rules into two classes, Wang had to go to the American Stock Exchange.

Under the leadership of Wang the products of the company changed several times.

Electronic typesetter

The first major project was an electronic metal type typesetter box with name Linasec and was introduced in 1964. He was commissioned by the Compugraphic, but retained the right to manufacture without payment of a dividend to Wang.

Computer

The Wang LOCI -2 ( there was also a LOCI -1, but this was not a real product) was introduced in 1965. She was probably the first desktop computer that could calculate logarithms. This was quite an achievement considering the fact that the computer did without integrated circuits, since he worked with 1275 individual transistors. In fact multiplications were calculated by addition of logarithms. This led to conspicuous rounding errors - as a result of two times two, for example, calculated the machine 3.999999999.

Wang was a respected computer Companies in 1965 until 1971., The Wang computer used Nixie tubes to display the numbers that could variously be programmed and used the technology of core memory. The price of a Wang computer moved in the mid- four -figure range. Competing companies were Hewlett -Packard, who presented the model HP- 9100A in 1968, and traditional computer companies such as Monroe and Marchant.

Wang computers were first used by scientists and engineers. Later, they came increasingly in the financial sector used because earlier mortgages and bonds were calculated with complicated tables. A dubious story tells of a banker, who compared the results of Wang computers with the tables and the incorrectness of the latter noted, whereby the reputation of Wang has been saved.

In the early seventies, Wang left the computer business, because he believed it would yield too little profit.

Word processing computer

The text processing computer WPS Wang (Wang Word Processor System) was introduced in 1976 and was immediately, as well as the successor, the Wang OIS (Wang Office Information System) in 1977, a success.

These computers were a technological breakthrough of its time. They were multi-user systems, each workstation had a Zilog Z80 microprocessor and 64 KiB of memory. The disk was centrally managed by a master station. Were networked among themselves, the stations with high-speed coaxial cables. Multiple masters were together, which enabled the work with the same files from a few hundred users.

Any software for the systems were written by Wang Laboratories. The specifications of the operating system, the file formats and the interface was a company secret. Wang did not want a third company, the products developed for connection to its system. This practice, however, was eased in the late eighties.

Minicomputer system

In the 80s, marketed Wang minicomputer systems of family VS ( Virtual System ), which also were a success as multi-user systems in the office environment.