Old Calculator Museum Advertising & Documentation Archive
Advertisement for Wang Laboratories 700 Calculator Electronics Magazine, April, 1969
This is a relatively early advertisement for Wang Laboratories' 700 Advanced Programming Calculator.
The Wang 700 calculator was Wang Laboratories' response to Hewlett Packard's March, 1968 introduction
of its famous 9100A electronic calculator. Prior to the public announcement of the 9100A, Dr. An Wang,
the founder and President of Wang Laboratories, was shown a pre-production HP 9100A calculator by one of the founders
of Hewlett Packard in a secret suite at a business machines trade show held in early March of 1968.
Dr. Wang was clearly shaken when shown the amazing capabilities of Hewlett Packard's first
electronic calculator, a machine that made Wang Labs' existing 300-series
Electronic Calculators look woefully outdated in comparison.
The Wang 700A was the beginning of what became a series of Wang 700 calculators, which included the
700B, 720A, 720B, and 720C. The 700-model calculators were had less standard
memory than then 720-model calculators, and also could not be expanded to the same level of memory as the 720 calculators.
The 720 calculators had modified microcode that allowed for more magnetic core memory, which the 700-model machines
did not have. The 700B was an expanded memory model of the original 700A. The 720A was the base memory 720 machine,
with the 720B having expanded memory. The 720C had the same memory as the 720B, but had modified firmware that
provided some additional I/O interfacing capabilities as well as a few additional programming instructions.
At the time this advertisement was published, the 700A was not yet shipping. The Wang 700 calculator was
introduced in February of 1969, and first customer deliveries of pre-ordered machines did not start until
January of 1970. Wang Labs was notorious for advertising for calculators that were not yet available,
allowing potential customers to pre-order, and then wait for their calculator to eventually show up.
In fact, actual production of the 700 calculators did not begin until very late in 1969, meaning that customers
that pre-ordered machines shortly after the calculator was
announced would end up waiting on the order of ten to eleven months before their calculator would
show up. Many prior customers of Wang Laboratories' calculators, and even some new
customers, were offered loaner Wang 370 or 380 Programmers that connected to a Wang 300-Series electronics
package to provide more programming capability than the basic 300-Series calculator's limited punched card
programming could provide. However, this had a down-side for the customer, as any programs that were developed by
the customer on the 370/380 programmers would have to be completely re-written for the 700-series calculator
when it finally showed up, as the 300-series and 700-series calculators had a completely different architecture
and programming instruction set.
The 700 calculator pictured in this advertisement is not a production model. It is very much a pre-production
prototype, with a front-slot loaded cassette transport versus the pop-out door loading for the cassette drive
on the production 700-Series calculators. It's entirely likely that the photograph in the ad is a "dummy" calculator
with nothing inside. There is no clear indication of the Nixie tube display window in the photo, and the keyboard
looks as if it might be a mock up of key-caps glued or otherwise secured to the keyboard panel rather than being an actual
keyboard.
It's interesting to note at the top of the ad, a number of calculators from other manufacturers are shown.
Far at the rear, what appears to be an early Toshiba calculator is shown, with next in line being
either a Friden 130 or Friden 132.
Next is what appears to be some kind of Sharp or Burroughs (Burroughs sold OEM versions of Sharp's calculators) calculator,
and in the front is a horrible photo of the amazing Olivetti Programma 101.
Truth be told, the only programmable calculator shown in the bunch is the Programma 101, which was one of the earliest
programmable electronic calculators made, introduced in October of 1965. In electronic calculator technology, by the time
this ad was published, the Olivetti Programma 101 was ancient history, although in its time, it was by far the most
sophisticated programmable electronic calculator available. All of the calculators shown were machines made
in 1965 to 1966, and from a technological standpoint, were very limited in what they could do with discrete
transistorized electronics. The Wang 700 utilized small-scale integrated circuit technology in order to package
the power it had in a desktop-sized machine - technology that simply didn't exist at the time these "old" machines
were produced, although Hewlett Packard's 9100A was a transistorized calculator with nary a digital integrated circuit
to be found in it, and it was rather more capable than the initial Wang 700A when it finally was available almost
two years after the 9100A was introduced.
Wang Labs also had a habit of over-speccing their calculators in their earlier advertisements for new calculator.
For example, the advertisement quotes addition and subtraction taking just 300uS, which is over five times faster
than the production calculator's add/subtract time of 1.7mS (equivalent to 1,700uS). Likewise, the advertisement
quotes trig operations executing in 250mS (1/4 second). In order to perform trigonometric operations, the Wang 700
must first have a trig function library program loaded into the calculator's memory from cassette, as trig operations
are not a part of the calculator's built-in functions. Since trigonometric operations are carried out by a
program running on the calculator rather than being hard-wired into the calculator's microcode, they execute
considerably more slowly than the microcoded math operations. As a result, the basic trig operation of finding
the Sine of 45 degrees takes about 650 milliseconds to return the answer, or about 2 1/2 times slower than the time
quoted in the advertisement.
All of these jabs aside, the Wang 700-Series calcualtor proved to be immensely popular. They were fast, relatively
easy to use, also rather easy to program, had a wide range of peripheral devices that could be connected to them,
had lots of magnetic-core memory (that didn't lose its content when the calculator was turned off) for storing
programs and data, and the cassette tape drive built into the calculator provided more program and data storage
than Hewlett Packard's magnetic card storage. Wang Labs also offered an extensive library of application programs
for the 700-Series calculators, ranging from things like Surveying calculations, Structural Engineering, Medical,
Electronic Engineering, Financial, and many other relams. A major application that garnered a lot of sales for
the 700-Series calculators was an Automobile Dealership application that took care of all of the calculations
and preparations of paperwork for consumer automobile loans. This dramatically sped up the process of getting the
necessary paperwork prepared for a buyer of an automobile, such that the paperwork could be generated right there
in the sales office, quickly and accurately, drastically speeding up the purchasing process. While the Wang 700-Series
calcualtors may have been a bit of a rushed response to the Hewlett Packard 9100A calculator, that took Wang Labs
too long to implement, the machines were powerful and capable enough to keep Wang Laboratories well in the
market for high-end programmable electronic calculators, despite Hewlett Packard's 9100A/
9100B machines, and the follow-on HP 9810A.
See the exhibit for the top-of-the-line Wang 700-series calculator, the
Wang 720C for more information on the Wang 700-Series calculators.
For more background on the general history of Wang Laboratories'
electronic calculators and calculator-based custom systems, see the Old
Calculator Museum's essay.
