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Wang logo circa 1980.
Wang logo circa 1970.
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Wang Laboratories was a computer company founded in 1951 by Dr. An Wang. The company was successively headquartered in Cambridge (1954-1963), Tewksbury (1963-1976) and Lowell, Massachusetts (1976-1992). At its peak in the 1980s, it was earning revenues of $3 billion/year and employed over 30,000 people.
The company was always directed by Dr. Wang, who played a personal role in setting business strategy and product strategy and thus must be credited both with the company's successes and failures.
Dr. Wang took steps to ensure that the Wang family would retain control of the company even after going public. He created a second class of stock, class B, with higher dividends but only one-tenth the voting power of class C. The public mostly bought class B shares; the Wang family retained most of the class C shares. (The letters B and C were used to ensure that brokerages would fill any Wang stock orders with class B shares unless class C was specifically requested). Wang stock had been listed in the New York Stock Exchange, but this maneuver was not quite acceptable under NYSE's rules, and Wang was forced to delist with NYSE and relist on the more liberal American Stock Exchange.
Under his direction, the company went through several distinct transitions between different product lines.
The company's first major project was an electronic phototypesetter, the Linasec, introduced in 1964. It was developed under contract to Compugraphic, which retained the rights to manufacture the machine without royalty. Compugraphic exercised these rights, effectively forcing Wang out of the market.
The Wang LOCI-2 (there had been a LOCI-1 but it was not a real product) was introduced in 1965 and was probably the first desktop calculator capable of computing logarithms, quite an achievement for a machine without any integrated circuits. The electronics included 1275 discrete transistors. It actually performed multiplication by adding logarithms, and roundoff in the display conversion was noticeable; 2 times 2 yielded 3.999999999.
From 1965 to about 1971, Wang was a calculator company, and a very well-regarded one. Wang calculators cost in the mid-four-figures, used Nixie tube readouts, performed transcendental functions, had varying degrees of programmability, and exploited magnetic-core memory in ingenious ways. Competition included HP, which introduced the HP9100A in 1968, and old-line calculator companies such as Monroe and Marchant .
Wang calculators were at first sold to scientists and engineers, but the company later won a solid niche in financial-services industries, which had previously relied on complicated printed tables for mortages and annuities.
One perhaps apocryphal story tells of a banker who spot-checked a Wang calculator against a mortgage table and found a discrepancy. The calculator was right, the printed tables were wrong, and the company's reputation was made.
In the early seventies, Dr. Wang believed that calculators would become unprofitable low-margin commodities, and decided to exit the calculator business.
The Wang word processor was designed by Harold Koplow and David Moros, who began by first writing the user's manual. This has long been known, and regarded as a brilliant design strategy. But it was apparently not a deliberate one. A 2002 Boston Globe article refers to Koplow as a "wisecracking rebel" who "was waiting for dismissal when, in 1975, he developed the product that made computers popularly accessible."
In Koplow's words, "Dr. Wang kicked me out of marketing. I, along with Dave Moros was relegated to Long Range Planning—'LRPed'. This, up until then, was tantamount to being fired: 'here is a temporary job until you find another one in some other company.'"
Although he and David Moros were indeed told to design a word processing machine, they were given no resources. They perceived the assignment as busywork. They went ahead anyway, wrote the manual, and convinced Dr. Wang to turn it into a real project. The word processing machine—the Wang WPS—was introduced in June 1976 and was an instant success, as was its successor, the 1977 Wang OIS (Office Information System).
These products were technological breakthrough in their day. They were multiuser systems. Each "workstation" looked like a typical terminal of its day, but contained its own Z80 microprocessor and 65K of RAM (roughly comparable in power to a typical 1982 IBM PC). Disk storage was centralized in a "master" unit that was shared by the workstations, and connection was via high-speed dual coax. Multiple OIS "masters" could be networked to each other, allowing file sharing among hundreds of users. And the systems could be easily operated and administered by office personnel without special training (in the days before schools taught "computer literacy"). It was an astonishing achievement.
All software for the systems was developed by Wang Laboratories, and the operating system, file formats, and electronic interface specification were closely held proprietary secrets. Wang did not want third parties developing for or interconnecting with its systems. (This was relaxed somewhat in the late eighties).