| +Home | Museum | Wanted | Articles | Advertising | Links |
| +Home | Museum | Wanted | Articles | Advertising | Links |
Wang Laboratories: From Custom Systems to Computers
By Rick Bensene
October, 2001
Updated 10/6/2022
Wang Laboratories made its early fortunes in the mid to late 1960's through a number of different models of electronic calculators, beginning with the LOCI-1 and LOCI-2, and extending through the extremely popular 300-series (the last of the series being the Wang 360SE four simultaneous user calculator). These machines made Wang Labs a major force in the early electronic calculator marketplace. An area of Wang's calculator technology that wasn't as obvious was Wang's Custom Systems Engineering department, building customized systems on contract to customers, mostly based on Wang's calculator technology and the use of Wang's LOGI-BLOC modular digital logic circuit board concept. This article outlines the amazing flexibility of Wang's use of electronic technology, and how it was applied to a wide range of applications that typically wouldn't be thought of as applicable to a calculator.
The Wang LOCI-2
The story of Wang Laboratories' involvement in electronic computation goes back to the mid-1950's. From the founding of his company in 1951, Wang Labs' business growth was driven by manufacture of magnetic core logic and shift-register components and custom measurement systems. Dr. Wang leveraged the experience with magnetic core based logic components that he gained while at Harvard to bootstrap his business. Along with the magnetic device business, Wang also took on the design and manufacture of various custom digital measurement equipment, everything from digital tachometers to a system that counted red blood cells. But, in the back of his mind, Dr. Wang's vision was to have his company become involved in the technology of using electronics to perform computation. While working at the Computation Laboratory at Harvard, Wang had been working intently on developing technology that was related to computing. In fact, while at Harvard, Dr. Wang developed some of the original principles of magnetic core memory. Dr. Wang's developments were later built upon by others, and turned into the predominant means for high-speed computer memory through the mid to late-1970's, when integrated circuit memory started to take over. When Dr. Wang left the Computation Lab to start his own business selling magnetic core-based logic, he had visions of his company someday becoming a computer company. Early on, his dreams were too aggressive for his shoestring budget. Even so, Dr. Wang always made sure he had time to tinker with his visionary computing projects even though he was kept quite busy running his business. One of Dr. Wang's pet projects was a differential analyzer -- a type of analog computer that could quickly solve complex mathematical problems.
Before digital computers became the mainstay of computing, analog computers were quite common. Analog computers use varying voltages and currents to represent variables, and various types of amplifiers to represent factors in differential equations, with the result being a final voltage or current that can be read out on a meter or graph. In the day, analog computers were heavily used in process control situations, such as calculating the correct aiming of the big guns on board a battleship. Many variables had to be considered simultaneously, including the position of the ship, the position of the target, the type of ammunition, the wind and other weather conditions, the constant motion of the ship from the action of the sea, and myriad other variables. The analog computer would simultaneously combine all of these variables to generate a real-time result that would control the large servomechanisms that aimed the guns to assure that their ordinance would be delivered accurately to the target. Such calculations were performed using very complex differential equations, which were modeled using mechanical or analog electronic means.
Dr. Wang felt that perhaps digital technology could be used to perform the same kinds of functions as analog computers, but in a way that much more flexible, allowing the machine to solve a wide variety of problems. Dr. Wang and some of his small staff of engineers began development of a digital differential analyzer called WEDILOG. The machine was completed in 1955, and a press-release was made introducing it.
Announcing introduction of the Wang WEDILOG, 1955
Prior to the development of digital technology, differential analyzers were analog machines, initially using mechanical elements such as precision gear trains and differentials to model the differential equations used for simulation of physical systems. Examples of the types of problems solved using differential analyzers were ballistics calculations (calculating the trajectory of a artillery round), modeling the flow of liquids and gasses, and even things like predicting the weather. Later, analog electronics took the place of the mechanical elements, dramatically reducing the size of differential analyzers, and improving their accuracy. The WEDILOG took the process to the next step, using digital logic (ones and zeroes), along with electronic circuitry that could perform mathematical operations. The WEDILOG machine contained some elements that would be re-used later to develop Wang's electronic calculator technology. The key development that made the WEDILOG special was a means to digitally generate logarithms quickly and accurately.
The WEDILOG differential analyzer used vacuum tubes and magnetic core technology (not in the traditional magnetic core memory sense, but as logic elements such as shift registers) in its implementation. 600 tubes, 200 semiconductor diodes, and 550 magnetic core elements made up the basic machine, which consumed three standard 19-inch relay racks. The analyzer was programmed by use of patch cables that interconnected the various parts together in much the same way that analog computers were constructed. In this sense, the analyzer was programmable by how it was wired, not by a list of instructions. The calculating elements of the WEDILOG operated on five-digit decimal numbers, with a range of -1.00000 to +1.00000. Input could come from any number of sources, depending on how the machine was wired, and output could be directed to a plotter, electrified typewriter, chart recorder, IBM punched card equipment, or other types of recording equipment. The projected sales price for the base digital differential analyzer was $20,000.
It isn't clear how many WEDILOG systems Wang produced and/or sold. The only references that have been found thus far for the WEDILOG analyzer occur in a report on the state of the digital computing industry commissioned by the Army Ballistics Research Laboratory in 1955, which indicates that only the one machine had been built as a prototype. However, this report was written likely very close to the time the machine was introduced, and thus, there hadn't been much time for the machine to have exposure to the marketplace.
Wang's DIGILOG Computer System
WEDILOG was the precursor for another computer developed by Wang Laboratories called DIGILOG. DIGILOG was a more general-purpose computer than WEDILOG. While WEDILOG was hard-wired as a digital differential analyzer, the DIGILOG was able to be configured for a wide variety of differing functions by interconnecting various modules together, combined with a program sequencing system that would step the machine through the process of solving a problem. The functional modules consisted of digital adders, multipliers, and integrators that had data busses that were interconnected with patch cables, with the operation of these units controlled by the central control unit. The base computer used Nixie tube readouts for output, though there were optional components that included an X-Y plotter and an automatic IBM typewriter. Whether or not WEDILOG and DIGILOG were successful products, these machines set the stage for the digital technologies within Wang Laboratories that would later return in Wang's electronic calculators, and propel Wang Laboratories to a meteoric rise in the technology marketplace of the mid- to late 1960's.
In the early 1960's, Wang Laboratories branched into the realm of digital instrumentation, marketing a line of various types of electronic equipment that served the needs of the test & measurement market. Most of these products were designed around Wang's LOGI-BLOC circuit modules, allowing for relatively easy customization of the instruments for certain types of applications. An example of one of these instruments is the Wang Model 2009 Universal Preset Counter instrument. This instrument was capable of counting events ranging from very slow, the very fast, as well as allowing a settable preset or trigger point that would start the count at a paticular number, or create a trigger pulse when the preset count was reached. The device provided various input and output channels that would allow the instrument to be controlled to some extent remotely, as well as for the input of count and trigger signals, and the output of a trigger signal. Such instrumentation would prove to be quite successful in a marketplace that was steadily moving away from analog measurement systems to digital, with the advantage of digital systems being higher accuracy and ease of interfacing to information processing systems that could digest the results of measurements and perform statistcal and other types of analysis in the digital realm.
Wang Laboratories Model 2009 Universal Preset Counter instrument, circa ~1963
By 1960, the continuing refinement of digital computing technology, spurred by the development of miniaturized components such as the transistor, began to change the face of the world of electronics, setting the stage for the beginning of the electronic calculator revolution. In 1961, a cooperative effort between two English companies, Sumlock Comptometer and Bell Punch, lead to the introduction of the Anita Mark VIII Thyratron tube-based electronic calculator, the first commercially sold all-electronic calculator. By 1965, the realm of electronic calculator technology had expanded greatly, with many companies world-wide realizing the value of bringing personal electronic calculating machines to an eager market. In the United States, Friden had introduced their very successful transistorized Friden EC-130 calculator in '63. Mathatronics Inc., had debuted their amazing and revolutionary Mathatronics Mathatron stored-program programmable desktop printing calculators in '64, and, at about the same time, Wyle Laboratories had introduced their magnetic drum memory-based Wyle WS-01 Scientific calculator. Wang Laboratories entered into the calculator market in 1964 when they introduced the fully transistorized LOCI-1, followed not long-thereafter by the improved and punched card programmable Wang LOCI-2. In Europe, Italy's Olivetti had introduced the astoundingly advanced and successful programmable calculator, the Olivetti Programma 101, the first electronic calculator to use a magnetic card for storage of programs and data. Also in Italy, Industria Macchine Elettroniche (IME) was marketing their very capable transistorized and magnetic core memory-based calculators, with a variety of peripherals that could be added to the base calculator to provide a high level of programmable calculating power. Germany's Olympia Werke, A.G., had begun marketing transistorized electronic calculators in Europe, also manufacturing subtle variations of their designs for U.S. mechanical calculator maker Monroe, for sale into the U.S. market. In Japan, a great deal of development was going on, with Oi Electric marketing their short-lived Parametron-based Aleph Zero 101 electronic calculator. Hayakawa Electric (Sharp) had introduced their first electronic calculator, the Sharp Compet 10, on the market, while Casio, Sony, and Canon were working toward introducing their own electronic calculator designs.
Digital Equipment's PDP-8 Mini Computer
At the time that electronic calculator technology was getting on its major growth curve, computer technology had come a long way from its beginnings of the 1940's. By the mid-1960's, computers had gone from massive, power-hungry, vacuum tube monsters to smaller and much more reliable transistor-based machines. While transistors made a desktop calculator a practical reality, transistors transformed computers from the behemoths they were into the beginnings of the mini-computer. In 1965, Digital Equipment introduced what is considered by most historians to be the first true mini-computer, the PDP-8 -- a capable digital computing system that could fit on a desktop, did not require special power or environmental conditions, and sold for a price-tag that would finally allow entities other than large corporations and governmental agencies to enter the computer age.With all of this technology becoming available, there were yet still a few areas of application that neither mini-computer technology or calculator technology could practically address. These areas were real-time process control and data acquisition systems. Mini-computers were just emerging, and, while much less expensive than their "giant brain" predecessors, were still quite expensive, and in some cases, still an unknown factor. Electronic calculators, in general, did not have the flexibility and interfacing ability to act as data acquisition systems, or as controllers for process control environments. This meant that these complex data acquisition and control systems had to be completely custom-designed, using 'hard-wired' digital and analog circuitry to implement their functionality. At the same time, there was a massive pent up demand for sophisticated control and data acquisition systems to automate processes which were being created that were too complex for humans to control manually; too tedious and time-consuming for a human to perform; or to speed up processes that had to be slowed down in order for humans to keep up. Examples of such systems technology included processes such as controlling the process of forming molten steel into sheets of metal, managing the complex mixing of compounds to grow semiconductors, or performing automated testing of the environmental control systems in space suits, among others.
One aspect of Wang Labs' business experience that gave them a one-up on their competitors is that the company already had experience with real-time control systems. In the early 1960's, before Wang got into the calculator business, Wang Labs had a business relationship with Warner & Swasey, a company that made production quality metal working machinery such as lathes and milling machines. Wang developed control systems that would automate the operation of these formerly human-operated machines, allowing faster, more accurate machining of precision metal parts. The work of developing these Numerical Control (or "NC", as the technology came to be known) systems contributed to Wang's later development of control systems based on its calculator technology. Another aspect of Wang's business that helped them in the custom control systems business is that early in the lifetime of the company, Wang had developed and marketed a line of transistorized, general-purpose logic devices called 'LOGI-BLOCs'. LOGI-BLOCs were a set of standardized circuit boards utilizing discrete component technology that provided basic digital logic and analog functions. Before the advent of integrated circuits, the LOCI-BLOC concept provided a building-block method for putting together complex systems.
Mr. Frank Trantanella (left) on the job, November, 1967
As a result of Wang's LOGI-BLOC business, the company had already been involved in the design of great deal of specialized control and data acquisition systems centered around their LOGI-BLOC technology. Wang had a department that specialized in custom systems, and one of the star engineers in the department was a man named Frank Trantanella. Mr. Trantanella started with Wang Labs at the time when the development of custom systems using LOGI-BLOCs was at a peak, and the LOCI calculator (which was initially prototype using LOGI-BLOCs), while in existence, had just began to catch on in the marketplace. Within a two year time frame of starting with Wang, Mr. Trantanella had designed over forty complete custom systems for various Wang customers. This was a frantic pace for complex systems design, which led Mr. Trantanella to come to the conclusion that there just had to be a better way.
Whether out of foresight, or simply due to perceived market demand, Dr. Wang, (the founder of Wang Laboratories), and his engineers had designed the LOCI-2 calculator with an Input/Output capability. The idea was that a calculator was more useful if it offered a number of different options to allow data to flow into and out of the calculator rather than just the keyboard and display. The simple I/O bus that was available on the LOCI-2 allowed the addition of external devices to provide hard copy output (such as the LOCI Printer), as well as allowing connection of devices to allow data to be input into the LOCI calculator.
The programmable nature of the LOCI-2, along with its Input/Output capability, led Mr. Trantanella to think that perhaps the LOCI could serve as a smart controller for custom systems. With the LOCI-2 acting as brains, and LOCI-BLOC interfaces for connecting to external equipment, a more generalized control system could be developed. In 1966, Armco Steel came to Wang Labs and asked them to design a system to monitor and record the temperature of steel ingots as they were travelling through reduction gates in their steel mill. To Mr. Trantanella, the LOCI seemed to be a perfect candidate as the brains for the system. A system was designed that used a Wang LOCI-2 calculator, combined with two punched card readers to store the control program, and a special interface developed to connect a Teletype Model 33 for input of data via punched tape and output of reports via the Teletype's printer. Additionally, special interfaces, built using the LOGI-BLOC circuit modules, were created that connected the calculator with a bank of ten analog-to-digital converters that allowed the LOCI to sample voltages from temperature sensors located along the path that the steel travelled through. All of these pieces were assembled together in a cabinet, and became the Wang 2315 Online Computing System.
The Wang 2315
The 2315 was sold into a number of differing environments where on-line acquisition and processing of data was needed. The 2315 was significantly less expensive than a mini-computer system of the time, and the scientific calculating capabilities of the LOCI-2 made the development of the data analysis programs quick and easy relative to the programming required on a mini-computer system. One weakness of a mini-computer system as compared to the LOCI-2 calculator was that complicated math software had to be written for the mini-computers to perform operations such as logarithms, which were 'built in' to the LOCI-2. Along with the cost benefit, the general concept of using the I/O bus to connect a myriad of peripheral devices to a programmable calculator proved to be a wonderful means of simplifying the design of customized data acquisition and control systems.
The LOCI-2-based Space Suit Test System Built for NASA
Photograph Courtesy of Frank Trantanella
As a result of his hard work in the custom systems group, in 1968, Mr. Trantanella was made a Vice President of the Systems group at Wang, reporting directly to Dr. Wang. During the time between developing the 2315, and his promotion to VP, Mr. Trantanella's Systems group had turned out a wide range of customized systems using the LOCI-2 calculator as the brains. One of the most remarkable, as well as historic, was a custom system that used the LOCI-2 to test the environmental control systems in space suits. At the time, NASA, the US Space Agency, was dead set on meeting President John F. Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the '60's. In order for a man to survive on the surface of the moon, a complete, self-contained environment had to be created for the astronaut. The space suit had to provide all aspects of life support that the astronaut needed, including heating and cooling, breathable air, and protection from various forms of radiation. NASA came to Wang with the specifications for a system that would test the heating and cooling systems of the space suit. The test system should be able to pinpoint any potential problems before an astronaut would find out about them at a time when help was almost a quarter of a million miles away. Trantanella's systems group built a special machine utilizing many of the concepts of the 2315 Online Computing System, using the LOCI-2 calculator as the main controller, that performed the testing task admirably. This was just one example of Wang calculators helping to make humankind's dream of setting foot on a different world a reality.
While Trantanella and his team were busily working on building all of these custom systems based on the LOCI calculator, Wang Laboratories had continued to grow its success in the calculator market. The LOCI-2, while an amazing machine for its time, wasn't very user-friendly. The LOCI was especially tedious for use in non-engineering applications, and Wang's marketing people were getting feedback indicating that a more easy-to-use calculator would dramatically expand Wang's penetration into the marketplace. As a result of this, Dr. Wang set his engineers to the task of building a similarly capable, but easier-to-use calculator. The result was the Wang 300-series calculators. These machines utilized much of the same logarithmic logic that made the LOCI-2 so capable, but improved dramatically on the usability angle. The 300-series calculators made it possible for Wang to market calculators into financial, business, and educational markets rather than just in the scientific and engineering areas of application that the LOCI-2 addressed. This move by Wang Labs proved to be a monstrous success. The Wang 300-series calculators were an instant hit in the marketplace, drawing droves of customers to buy Wang calculators rather than those of their competitors.
While this was a wonderful development for the company, the success of the 300-Series calculators shifted focus away from the LOCI, as well as the custom systems business. The business reality was that the lion's share of Wang's revenue was now being generated by the 300-series calculators, and from a percentage point of view, the systems business, as well as Wang's other businesses (typesetting machines, LOGI-BLOC logic modules, and machine controls) were comparatively small-potatoes. To Mr. Trantanella, it was clear that the days of his Systems group were numbered. To try to fend out the inevitable, Trantanella had the idea of using the calculating guts of a 300-Series calculator as the basis for a general purpose computing system -- a system that expanded on the ideas developed in the making of the 2315 and other custom systems. The key concept that Trantanella had in mind was the use of a standardized bus structure that would allow various parts of the system to communicate with each other in a consistent fashion. In this way, the 300-series math processor could communicate to a core-memory system, which in turn could communicate with I/O modules, which would interface the system to the outside world. The resulting system would act a lot like a computer, but would have high-level math functions built-in, and would be much more simple to program. The system would also be a major step above a programmable calculator, as it could have significantly more data storage capacity, as well as a great selection of input/output capabilities that even the best calculators of the time couldn't match. The other concept of the system was that the various functional components were modular, meaning that the system could easily be expanded by simply adding a module to the bus structure, not to mention making troubleshooting and repair much easier.
Mr. Trantanella devised a standardized bus structure that could be used to connect the various functional modules of the system. The functional modules (Wang called them "boxes") were each contained in a rack-mountable chassis with connectors on the rear to connect the units together via the bus structure. The system consisted four main boxes; the "MEMORY CONTROL", "ARITHMETIC UNIT", "TELETYPE INTERFACE", and "MEMORY" boxes. The MEMORY CONTROL box was the main control for the system, which managed communications between all of the boxes, and performed instruction fetching, decode, and execution sequencing, as well as providing 1K bytes of base memory for the system. The ARITHMETIC UNIT served as the math processor. This box was essentially a modified Wang 320E electronics package, with interfaces to the standard bus rather than the keyboard/display unit normally used with the 320E. The TELETYPE INTERFACE managed various I/O functions, including connection to the 4002 keyboard unit(s) as well as providing I/O interfacing for a Teletype Model 33 teleprinter. MEMORY boxes provided the main memory for the system, each of which contained 8K-bits (organized as 1024 words of eight bits each) of magnetic core memory, with interfacing circuitry to allow the memory to communicate with the other units. Up to three memory boxes could be connected to the system to allow it to address up to 4K bytes of memory. Mr. Trantanella wrote up a patent application for the bus concept, and Wang Labs was granted US Patent #3470542 in September, 1969.
Trantanella and a number of engineers on his design staff worked in 'skunk-works' mode to put together a prototype of the system in late 1966, and found that the whole concept worked out remarkably well. The use of a Wang 300-series calculator as the arithmetic unit for the system meant that the calculator operated in decimal, had floating-point math, two add/subtract accumulators, four store/recall memory registers, multiplication/division, and scientific functions (log, anti-log, square root, and squaring) all built-in. On a mini-computer, a large and complex library of programs would have to be written to provide the same capabilities, and wouldn't make the calculations as quickly as the 'hard-coded' Wang hardware could. Trantanella was understandably proud of the accomplishment. The ease of programming, speed, memory, and interfacing capabilities of the machine really gave it an edge, and the fact that a complete system could retail for around $10,000, with a healthy dose profit margin included, made it all the more exciting. Trantanella felt that it would be easy to sell Dr. Wang on the idea of making the computer an official product.
As it turned out, rousing Dr. Wang's interest wasn't quite as easy as thought. After a bit of prodding, Dr. Wang did approve making the system a product, initially marketed as the Wang 4000 Computing System, though it was clear Dr. Wang was really looking for something else. By the time the system was ready for production, major changes were afoot in the calculator market, as well as the computer market. Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-8 minicomputer had been selling like hotcakes. And, even though it was rather expensive, many of the systems were sold into exactly the process-control and data-acquisition markets that Mr. Trantanella's pet project was targeted at.
The Wang 4000 Computing System with 4002 Keyboard/Display Unit
Photograph Courtesy of Frank Trantanella
When Dr. Wang was asked about making Trantanella's brainchild product, it was clear that he was preoccupied. Always thinking ahead, Dr. Wang knew that the calculator marketplace was changing very rapidly, and that while his company held a major leadership position in the high-end calculator market, there were forces afoot that could jeopardize Wang's position in fairly short order. Among these were the introduction of practical integrated circuits which made it much easier to manufacture a calculator that consumed less space and provided more capabilities. Also, another big factor was "Japan, Inc.". Japan's electronics industry had seriously embraced the calculator market, and companies like Hayakawa Electric(Sharp) Casio, Sony, Hitachi, and Sanyo were hitting the market with low-cost, high quality desktop calculators using early integrated circuits. While not as capable as Wang's 300-series calculators, they were nonetheless making a dent in some of the lower-end market areas that Wang had focused on adapting to, including finance and accounting, the insurance industry, and other non-scientific areas that still required calculating power, but did not need the advanced math functions that the Wang calculators provided. Dr. Wang had come to the conclusion that Wang needed to enter the computer business to expand his company's product offerings and revenue base, providing future room for growth as the calculator market inevitably shook out.
A Complete Wang 4000 Computer System, August, 2022
4002 Keyboard Unit on Top of Rack (with a spare display assembly on top of it
4000 System Rack w/Memory Control, Arithmetic Unit, Memory Unit, and Teletype Interface Unit
Teletype Model 33ASR teleprinter to the Right of Rack
Note Wang 4000 Programmer's Manual in Copy Holder of Teletype
Currently On Exhibit at the VCFED (www.vcfed.org) Museum at the InfoAge Science Center in Wall, NJ
Museum Intends to Restore this System to Full Operation
Photograph Courtesy of Douglas Crawford, VCFED
With these thoughts churning around in his mind, Dr. Wang had his own concept of the computer he wanted to market. Wang wanted a "true" computer, not just a glorified calculator, that was faster, less expensive, and more powerful than Digital Equipment's mini-computers. Dr. Wang wanted Wang Labs to become the #1 computer manufacturer, pushing DEC aside in the mini-computer marketplace, with an eye towards making a big dent in "Big Blue" IBM's computer business, and it wasn't clear to Dr. Wang that the system Trantanella was proposing was what was needed to meet this objective. Dr. Wang's enthusiasm for the project seemed luke-warm at best, but he went ahead and gave approval to go ahead with the product.
The Wang 4000 Computer that was displayed in Dr. Wang's Museum at Wang corporate headquarters
Photograph Courtesy of Bob Trottier
With Dr. Wang's rather weak blessing, production of the system began, along with all of the peripheral functions related to selling the system, including generation of marketing materials, documentation, and service and support systems. Finally, the machine known as the Wang 4000 Computer System, was informally introduced at the annual IEEE conference in New York, in March of 1967. As Trantanella expected, there was a reasonable amount of interest from potential customers in the areas of process control, data acquisition and processing, and happily, some less obvious areas such as accounting, finance, and engineering computing. Wang Labs' marketing organization managed to generate enough interest in the press to get the system written up in the April 24, 1967 edition of McGraw Hills' "Product Engineering" magazine with a title of Components "talk" to each other through computer's "busline". Trantanella's vision had become a reality.
Another View of the Wang 4000 Detailing the Model 4002 Keyboard/Display Unit
The Wang 4000 Computing System was formally introduced at the BEMA (Business Equipment Manufacturers Association) show in New York in late October, 1967. Interestingly enough, it appears that Wang's marketing people seized the interest from folks with financial applications, because the machine was touted as developed for financial applications -- not quite the data acquisition and analysis applications the 4000 was really designed for.
A shot of the Wang booth (note Wang 4000 at left) at the 1967 BEMA show
By December of 1967, orders had been booked for seven of the 4000 Computing System, with some pretty impressive customers, including the New York Stock Exchange(Financial Analysis), Western Electric(Automated Diode Testing), and Schweickart & Co.(Bond Pricing & Coupon Value Financial Calculation). It was clear that the 4000 had a broad potential market, and given that some large business entities had ordered machines, it seemed that the 4000 was on its way to great success.
The monolithic version of the Wang 4000 Computer System
Image Courtesy of Bob Trottier
One of the objections in the business/accounting market of the 4000 Computing System was that its rack mount design didn't really fit well into an office environment. As a result, a monolithic version of the 4000 Computing System, adding some enhancements (two built-in magnetic tape drives, and the ability to address more memory, up to 32K bytes), was developed. This machine packed all of the components into a single chassis that was more attractive for an office environment, organized in a more horizontal form-factor. Very little is known about this machine. It isn't known when production of this version of the 4000 began; how many of these machines were produced or sold, and details about its capabilities. The machine pictured above was from the museum that was maintained (at Dr. Wang's direction) at Wang corporate headquarters. After Dr. Wang passed away, corporate interest in maintaining the museum waned, and over time, the content of the museum was put into storage and later, disposed of.
Wang 370 & 380 Programming Keyboards for Wang 300-Series Calculators
When all was said and done, the 4000 Computer simply didn't work out as one might have thought. Wang's sales force didn't really know how to sell this "computer", as it was much different than the calculators they were accustomed to selling, making it difficult for potential customers to really understand what benefits the system could deliver. Along with this difficulty, shortly after the introduction of the 4000 Computer, Wang's calculator division introduced some enhancements to the 300-series calculators, including the Model 370 and 380 Programming Keyboards. These devices allowed the Wang 300-series calculators to provide much more advanced programming and I/O functions to the 300-Series calculators. An input/output interfacing capability within the 370/380 keyboard units provided the ability to interface external devices such as analog to digital converters, output devices (including the Teletype Model 33), additional core memory storage, and even custom interfaces to test and measurement equipment. The Wang 370 provided programmability from punched cards, and the 380 utilized a special magnetic tape cartridge to store the programs. While not as capable as the 4000, these enhancements to the 300-series took away some potential customers for the 4000 system, because they provided programmability and I/O interfacing capabilities at significantly lower cost than the 4000. Wang's own calculator business in some way subverted it's own "computer" business. At the same time, Dr. Wang had started up a special project for some of his sharpest engineers to design a true minicomputer, capable of winning sales away from Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), or even going up against IBM in the smaller-systems market.
Hewlett Packard's 9100A
Just a year after the 4000 was introduced, something happened that turned Wang Labs upside-down. Hewlett Packard, a very highly- respected manufacturer of high-end electronic test equipment, introduced a calculator that took the world by storm. HP's 9100A set a completely new and much higher standard for a high-end electronic calculator. The 9100A offered amazing math capabilities, including comprehensive trigonometric functions, true computer-like stored program capabilities, and a large core-memory that could store data and program steps interchangeably, all of which was crammed into a smartly-styled monolithic desktop unit that was not all that much larger than one of Wang's 370 or 380 programmer units. To add insult to injury, the 9100A was more accurate than Wang's 300-series calculators, vastly faster, and also provided extensive I/O interfacing capabilities. Along with this, the HP 9100 used the same discrete-transistor circuitry that Wang's machines used, but did so much more efficiently than Wang's LOCI and 300-series calculators. Many potential customers looking for a high-end calculator at the time promptly dropped the idea of buying a Wang calculator and got in line to buy one of HP's wonder-machines.
Wang Labs didn't have a calculator to counter HP's 9100A. His engineers were tied up working on the computer project, and nobody was working on anything in terms of the next generation of Wang Labs calculators. The computer wasn't ready, and Wang Labs' revenue stream was entirely dependent on its calculators. With past Wang customers looking to HP's machine to upgrade from Wang's 1964-era technology, and potential new customers enamored with HP's amazing machine, a dramatic downturn hit Wang's bread-and-butter business in no time flat. Something had to happen, and it had to happen quickly. The first thing Dr. Wang did was redirect the efforts of the entire company toward taking what had been done on the computer project and transform it into a high-end calculator to challenge the HP 9100. Along with this, price reductions across the entire 300-series line were implemented, as well as major incentives given to the sales and marketing departments to push as many 300-series calculators as they could.
The Wang 700-Series Calculator
All of Wang's resources were channeled into making the new calculator to keep Wang's core business alive. The re-directed computer effort became the Wang 700-Series, which by all accounts were very capable machines. The machines were very computer-like in their architecture, which is not surprising given that the design was based on the architecture developed for the computer. The 700-series calculators utilize a microcoded architecture, a way to embed the functionality of the machine into a very low-level type of code that is stored in a read-only memory (ROM). The challenge was developing a ROM that could hold the microcode required to run the machine. At the time, integrated circuit ROMs were too expensive to use to make a machine that could compete with HP in terms of price. Wang developed a special unique wire-rope ROM, which was similar to a wire-rope ROM that HP used in their calculator, but Wang's design put all of the microcode in the ROM, while HP only put low-level sequencing information in their wire rope ROM, and designed an incredibly bleeding-edge technology multi-layer circuit board that contains the microcode for their machine. The Wang 700 used magnetic core memory, as did the HP machine. The Wang 700-series machines actually had a much more general-purpose and flexible Input/Output interfacing capability than HP's machine did, but it took Wang quite some time to come up with peripherals that the calculator could use. The 700 had a built-in cassette tape drive for storing programs and data on, which had much more capacity than HP's magnetic card storage system. The Wang 700 was also a bit faster at most math operations, as well as executing programs. The 700's programming instruction set was more comprehensive than the HP machine, but despite this, it was quite easy to learn to use. The credit for developing the microcode for the Wang 700 goes to a single person who wrote it all, named Harold Koplow (11/21/1940-11/4/2004), who was one of Dr. Wang's few "insiders" who took direction from Dr. Wang only. In many cases, Koplow knew better how to do what needed to be done, and just did things his own way...and it worked. To learn more about the Wang 700 and its development, see the Old Calculator Museum exhibit on the Wang 720C.
While the Wang 700 was truly an amazing machine, it simply took too long to get to market. Wang Labs announced the 700-series calculators in February of 1969, even though they had no real product at that time. The computer re-engineering effort took longer than expected, frustrating some customers that held out for Wang's response to the HP 9100A. Production shipping of the 700-series didn't begin until early 1970, leading some customers that had placed advance orders for the 700-series to cancel their order and buy HP's machine. Along with those difficulties, just a few months after HP introduced the 9100A, they announced the 9100B, a follow-on calculator with double the memory of the 9100A, along with improved programming functions.
As a result of the coming 700 calculator's computing capabilities, and in an effort to add some life to the aging 300-Series, Trantanella's 4000 Computer System was demoted to being marketed as an extension to the 300-series calculators. The system lost it's Computer System nomenclature, and was re-badged the Wang 390 Programmable Calculating System. By losing the computer designation, becoming a mere calculator, it became more difficult to sell the 4000. Getting any resources to enhance the system to make it more marketable was impossible with Wang's engineering department devoted entirely to making the 700 Calculator a market reality. HP's machines offered similar interfacing capabilities, cost less, were faster, and offered much better programming features than the "390". Lastly, the cost of mini computers had continued to come down, with Digital Equipment offering reduced-cost versions of it's PDP-8 series of computers into the process control and data acquisition markets. All of these factors contributed to a continuing decline in Wang's ability to sell the 4000/390 system, and finally in mid-'70, it was dropped from the product line. Mr. Trantanella saw the handwriting on the wall, with Wang's Systems business languishing for lack of resources, and his computer system generating perhaps only a dozen or so sales. Mr. Trantanella left Wang Laboratories shortly thereafter, and went on to start his own very successful company, Tranti Systems, essentially inventing the business of Point-of-Sale computing systems used in fast-food restaurants.
The Wang 3300 Timeshared BASIC Mini Computer
Wang's 700-Series calculators did help rescue the company from the decline of its calculator business, allowing Wang to continue to compete in the calculator marketplace into the late 1970's. It came, however, at a huge expense. The company had expended a great deal of its cash reserves, as well as running all aspects of the company extremely hard to bring the machine to market. To make things worse, Dr. Wang, who was always thinking far ahead, and at the time the Wang 700-series came to market, Dr. Wang knew that a major shakeup was imminent in the calculator business. The advent of large-scale integrated circuits that could hold an entire calculator on a couple of chips meant that in order to compete, a calculator manufacturer either had to be at the mercy of the integrated circuit manufacturers, or had to have its own IC design and fabrication facilities, which were extremely expensive. Though Wang Labs still had a good share in the calculator market, things were changing very quickly, and Dr. Wang knew that he could no longer rely on calculators to keep his company healthy.
A Two-User Wang 3300 System
Dr. Wang decided to slowly de-emphasize his company's calculator business, allowing it to gracefully age out of existence, while still providing revenue to fund future research. At the same time, he drove the company to pursue new markets. One market Dr. Wang still wanted to compete in was the minicomputer marketplace. By that time, though, Digital Equipment Corporation had a five-year head start in the mini-computer business. Even so, Wang had his engineers re-use some of the design concepts of the computer system that became the 700-series calculators, and created a small computer system called the 3300 Time Shared Mini-Computer.
The 3300 computer, announced in February of 1970, and first shipped in March of '71 (in keeping with Wang's reputation of announcing product long before it is actually shipped to customers), was quite aggressive for the early '70s', with true multi-user capability and the popular BASIC programming language. The 3300 could support from two to sixteen simultaneous users connected to the system via modified IBM Selectric I/O terminals or Teletype Model 33ASR terminals. Remote terminals could also connect via telephone lines. The system could contain between 12K and 64K of core memory, organized as 8-bit words. The CPU architecture was quite forward-looking in terms of the use of the 8-bit word, the same word-size as used in the revolutionary 8008 microprocessor from Intel. The CPU was relatively fast, with a memory cycle time of 1.6µsec, utilizing Small and Medium-Scale TTL integrated circuits for the logic. The arithmetic unit of the CPU provided both binary and BCD (Binary-Coded Decimal) math processing, allowing the machine to perform native math operations on decimal numbers for better numerical accuracy. The computer operated with a 4-byte Binary-Coded-Decimal (BCD) mantissa (eight significant digits), and a single byte binary exponent ranging from -64 to +64.
The basic two user Wang 3300 system consisted of the 3300 CPU unit, which came with 4K bytes of memory installed. Two additional 4K memory modules were added for a total of 12K bytes of core memory, a Terminal I/O Controller, two IBM Selectric I/O typewriters, a dual drive magnetic cassette tape system, the BASIC language software, and system installation and setup. Total cost for the base configuration was initially $17,550. A comparable two-user timesharing system from Digital Equipment would come in at around $20,000, giving Wang an edge in price over their competitor. However, there were some limitations to the 3300. The only online storage was either a magnetic cassette drive, which was rather slow, and made file-based operations cumbersome. DEC's mini computers could be had with high-speed, high-capacity disk drive systems which made file operations fast and efficient. The lack of a disk storage subsystem for the 3330 was a pretty serious detriment. Wang later introduced a disk system for the 3300, but by the time it came out, it was too little, too late.
The 3300's BASIC language was fairly comprehensive, providing all the functionality needed to perform just about any type of operation. A rich set of math functions was included, with trig, logarithmic and exponential functions. The BASIC language provided an "immediate mode", which allowed a math expression to be typed in online, with an instant solution printed on the terminal without the user having to resort to writing a program. This made the 3300 useful as an interactive calculator, albeit an expensive one.
The First Wang 3300 Timeshared Minicomputer In Use at Weymouth South High School, Weymouth, Massachusetts, April, 1971
The 3300 sold reasonably well in a number of markets, especially educational institutions, where the cost of commercial time-sharing services were very high, and shared desktop programmable calculators simply couldn't keep up with the demands of higher learning. Schools were also under a great deal of pressure to produce graduates who had practical skills in computer science -- skills that could only be taught using real computers. Even though the 3300 had a reasonable degree of success, there was a problem.
By early 1972, mini computer technology was advancing at a tremendous rate, and some aspects of the 3300 made it increasingly difficult to sell against fierce competition from DEC, and newcomer to the mini-computer industry, Data General. Dr. Wang had seen the future coming, and had an idea that he thought would make a big splash. A "personal" computer. (I use quotations around the word "personal" to distinguish it from the ubiquitous "PC". Back in those days, there were only mainframe monsters, commercial time sharing systems, and complicated mini-computer systems.) At the time, the notion of an individual having a true computer all to themselves seemed ridiculous. Even so, Dr. Wang's idea was to make a computer system that was small, comparatively inexpensive, very easy to use, and suitable for use by an individual user. The idea was to put the power of the 3300 timesharing computer right in front of the user, eliminating the need for timesharing.
Hewlett Packard's 9830A "Calculator"
A great idea, provided it could be brought to the market first. As was the case with Hewlett Packard scooping up the calculator market with their 9100A calculator, in early 1972, HP introduced a machine that made the 3300 system much more difficult to sell. The HP 9830A "calculator" was a monolithic, desktop computer, programmable in BASIC, with built-in cassette tape drive, and extensive I/O interfacing capabilities. The HP9830 was the first "personal" computer. HP defined the line in the sand distinguishing calculator from computer. Essentially, the 9830 was the machine that Dr. Wang had envisioned, and had devoted a great amount of resource to develop. Unfortunately, Wang would have to wait until almost a year after HP's introduction of the 9830 before their new computer would be ready to sell.
By early 1973, the new computer was ready. It was christened the Wang 2200. The 2200 was not monolithic like HP's machine, but instead consisted of three parts. The CPU unit was a 60-pound module that connected via cables to an enclosure that contained a raster-scan CRT monitor and a digital cassette tape drive. The display head then connected to a separate keyboard unit, using micro-switch-activated keys similar to those used on Wang's calculators. This keyboard made the machine somewhat tedious to use, as the keys felt more like a calculator than a conventional typewriter keyboard, and were not laid out in a standard "QWERTY" keyboard arrangement. Even with the weak keyboard, the CRT display gave the 2200 an advantage over HP's 9830, as the 9830 provided only a 32 character, single line LED dot-matrix display. The CRT display on the 2200 could display 16 lines of 64 characters each, providing much more data at once to the user. While sharing the CPU architecture of the 3300, (as well as the 1.6us basic cycle time), the 2200 was more optimized, had a more powerful BASIC language, and overall was considerably more flexible than the 3300. Another great improvement was that the BASIC language firmware was embedded in ROM, meaning that the machine came up immediately ready to use. The 3300 had to have its BASIC system loaded into core memory from paper tape or cassette tape in order to be usable -- a process that could take quite a while.
Wang 2200 System Used by 8th Graders at Fenn School in Concord, Massachusetts, Late 1973
Even with Hewlett Packard stealing the thunder from Wang Labs, the 2200 was a great success. Wang was able to leverage their good reputation for providing quality solutions to specific areas, including financial, insurance, engineering, and educational institutions. Successes of the 2200, along with Wang's new Word Processing Systems, allowed Wang to let its calculator business decline gracefully, leading to the beginning of a long line of successful mainframe, mini, and later, micro-computer systems that made Wang a serious player in the computer industry for years to come. While Wang never became a serious challenger to Digital Equipment, and remained a mere speck on IBM's radar, the evolution of Wang's computer business from that of providing customized process control and testing systems, to a solid participant in the computer marketplace of the 1980's, is a great reflection of the commitment, leadership, brilliance, and persistence of Dr. An Wang and his company.