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Old Calculator Museum Advertising & Documentation Archive
Early (grossly premature) advertisement for Wang Model 700 Calculator
Electronics Magazine, February 17, 1969



This is a very early announcement advertisement (so far, the earliest found) for the Wang 700 Electronic Calculator, which later became the 700-Series calculators. The Wang 700 calculator was announced over a year before it was actually available for sale, a prime example of what later became termed as "vaporware". The reason for the early announcement of a machine that existed only in the form of an empty cabinet mock-up form was that in 1968, Hewlett Packard had introduced (and had real machines to sell) the HP 9100A calculator, which took Wang Laboratories completely by surprise, with the 9100A greatly surpassing Wang's highly-successful 300-Series calculators.

This ad shows a very early version of what is likely an empty cabinet just keyboard using a front-loading cassette tape drive, an early mock-up of the actual calculator it would become in just over a year after this advertisement was first published.

By the time the 700-Series calculators went into production, the cassette drive was a tilt-out top-loading device, and there were some changes to the keyboard arrangement. Later advertising, still before Wang actually had a sell-able product, showed progressively more-refined versions of the calculator as it became closer to a production reality.

See the Exhibit for a Wang 700-Series calculator, or, for more information on the history of Wang Laboratories' electronic calculators, read the Old Calculator Museum's Article on Wang's calculator (and calculator-based custom-systems) evolution.