News Archive - Wang Laboratories' New York Stock Exchange IPO Announcement
Wang Laboratories' Initial Public Offering on New York Stock Exchange
Electronics Magazine, September, 18, 1967
Wang Laboratories was founded in June of 1951 by Dr. An Wang[2/7/1920-3/24/1990] and long-time
friend Dr. Ge Yao Chu[5/3/1918-8/4/2011], initially to develop custom
control and automation systems using a system of standardized
ferro-electronic logic modules for various functions based on magnetic
core logic technology that Dr. Wang had invented when he was working as
a post-Doctoral researcher at Harvard University's Computation Laboratory.
For more information on the history of Wang Laboratories, see the Old Calculator
Museum essay Wang Laboratories:
From Custom Systems to Computers.
Wang Laboratories really came to the fore and began making serious money
when it entered the fledgeling electronic calculator marketplace in 1964 with
its advanced LOCI-1 and
LOCI-2 desktop electronic
calculators. The LOCI calculators were capable of advanced math functions
that were simply not available on any other desktop electronic
calculator. The LOCI-2 added programmability through punched cards,
as well as having a generalized I/O interface that allowed the
LOCI-2 to communicate with external
devices like printers, paper tape readers, and even electronic
instrumentation such as voltmeters, programmable power supplies, digital-to-
analog and analog-to-digital converters. These features were simply not
available on any other electronic calculator for some time to come.
The advanced capabilities of the LOCI-2, as well as the follow-on
Wang 300-Series provided Wang
Laboratories a huge market for their calculators. The company grew
at a tremendous rate, making impressive profit despite spending a lot
of money to support the growth.
In 1967, Dr. Wang, always prescient in his thinking, began to have concern
that fledgling integrated circuit technology, which had begun to show up
in a few electronic calculators(not his, though), would advance to the
point where integrated circuit manufacturers could eventually take control
of the electronic calculator market. He decided it was time to change
course, and take his company public in order to raise money to do research
and development on computers and other types of business machines.
This would set the stage to begin a gradual but deliberate move away from
the company's bread-and-butter business of electroniccalculators
to other lines of business, while at the same time leveraging the
substantial income from the calculator business to sustain the company
as it made the changes. The IPO led to Wang Labs becoming an early leader
in word processing, as well as being successful with small "personal"
computers (long before the IBM PC), to eventually
turn Wang Labs into an enterprise level business machines provider
in the 1980's..
It was after Wang Labs' very successful IPO that the company
was forced to continue developing electronic calculators, creating a
line of advanced calculators in order to keep the
calculator business healthy during Dr. Wang's transition plan.
The resulting line of calculators
made Wang Labs the largest electronic calculator company(in sales)
in the US, and one of the undisputed leaders in the
high-end electronic calculator marketplace, with highly advanced calculators
like the Wang 700-Series being
among the most powerful electronic calculators in the world until
the mid-1970's. It is at that time when Dr. Wang's premonition came true, with
microprocessors and large scale integrated circuits
essentially turning electronic calculators into small computers with specific
firmwar and a calculator user-interface defining their function
rather than purpose-designed hardware. At this point, the chip makers
became the focal point for the electronic calculator business rather than
the calculator manufacturers themselves, because inevitably, the calculator
manufacturers had to turn to the chip makers to create ever-more powerful,
yet less expensive calculators in order to be able to compete. The tiny
computers that made up these mid-'70's calculators ended up evolving
into the microprocessor that made possible the ubiquitous "PC", forever
changing our world.
This announcement of Wang's initial public offering on the New York
Stock Exchange, dated August 24, 1967, marked the beginning of a new
era for Wang Laboratories, leading Wang Laboratories to a peak where
it had annual revenue nearing $3 billion, and over 30,000 employees
world-wide.
