+Home     Exhibit     Museum     Articles     Advertising     Wanted  

Old Calculator Museum Advertising & Documentation Archive
Advertisement for the Wang Laboratories New 700A Advanced Programming Calculator


Possibly the last pre-production advertisement for the new Wang 700A Electronic Calculator
Electronics Magazine, January 19, 1970


This is likely the last pre-production advertisement for the Wang 700A calculator prior to Wang Laboratories began advertising that the calculator was in production with orders beginning to ship to customers.

The Wang 700 was announced in February of 1969, about a year before production of the Wang 700A calculator began. Wang Laboratories had a bit of a reputation for advertising their calculator products significantly before they were actually available for shipment, and somewhat worse, they would accept orders for the machines significantly before any were able to be shipped. It is clear that Wang Labs notified customers that ordered product before it was available that there would be a delay before delivery, but on frequent occasions, the projected availability date would slip, causing further delays. In the case of the Wang 700A, Wang Labs frequently ended up providing loaner Wang 300-series calculators with the Model 370 Programmer and where needed, Model 372 or 373 Data Storage units to customers who complained about the delays in getting their Wang 700A calculators, and would even offer free consulting services to develop the programs for the 370, as well as re-writing the programming for the Wang 700A when it finally arrived.

The question "Calculator or Computer?" that the advertisement raises is a valid one. The 700A had as much magnetic core memory as some small minicomputers of the time, allowing up to 960 steps of program storage, and up to 120 floating point memory storage registers, each of which can have each of the basic four math functions operated upon, effectively turning each register into a four-function calculator.. With advanced math functions that execute at speeds that exceed those of some minicomputer mathematics library subroutines, the 700A could outperform some small computers at pure number-crunching. The 700A operated natively with high accuracy floating point numbers with a numeric range of 1.099 to 1.0-99, while minicomputers operated in pure binary. In order to provide decimal floating point representation, minicomputers either had to rely on fairly slow floating point math subroutines for all floating point math operations, or if high speed was needed, the use of add-on floating point math processor that, while able to operate on floating point numbers very quickly, added significantly to the price-tag for a minicomputer system capable of the same mathematical range as the Wang 700A. With these advantages, as well as a substantial set of programming instructions, the 700A could actually out-compute small minicomputer systems in certain situations. Even though rather expensive for an electronic calculator, the Wang Labs 700A was much less expensive than most similarly-capable minicomputer systems at the time.

See the exhibit for the later top-of-the-line Wang 700-series calculator, the Wang 720C for more information. Or for more background on the general history of Wang Laboratories' electronic calculators and calculator-based custom systems, see the Old Calculator Museum's essay.