Star News, Tuesday, July 21, 1964

A short article announcing that Wyle Laboratories, Inc. has been awarded its largest contract in the company's history by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for the expansion of facilities at the Wyle Laboratories facility at NASA's Huntsville, Alabama facility, today known as the Marshall Space Flight Center.

The notable aspect of this contract is that NASA agreed as part of the contract to purchase an undisclosed number of the Wyle Laboratories Scientific electronic calculators. Based on the date of the article, it is assumed that, at least initially, NASA would have purchased the model WS-01 Wyle Scientific calculator, introduced in April of 1964, which used a small magnetic disc drive as its main memory element.

The Wyle Labs-designed magnetic memory device turned out to be problematic and as a result of the field failure rate, the calculator was re-engineered to use a magnetostrictive delay line instead of the spinning magnetic disk. This modification made the resulting model WS-02 Scientific much more reliable than its predecessor.

Many of the WS-01 calculators that had been delivered to customers ended up being field-upgraded to the WS-02 version. This was accomplished by complete replacement of the logic unit, removal of the disc memory drive, and addition of the magnetostrictive delay line, as well as moving around one of the power supply circuit boards.

The WS-01 and WS-02 calculators operated identically from a user's perspective, meaning that customers did not have to re-learn the use of the calculator. The field upgrades of WS-01 calculators were performed by Wyle Labs field technicians at no cost to the WS-01 purchaser. The cost for the re-engineering necessary to replace the rotating memory with the magnetostrictive delay line, as well as all of the field troubleshooting and eventual re-work of many of the WS-01 calculators purchased, was considerable, and even though the WS-02 model was much more reliable, the calculator was not considered a successful product by Wyle Laboratories, and production was suspended and the product taken off the market sometime in 1967, ending Wyle Laboratories' foray into the crazy electronic calculator marketplace of the mid-1960's.