I ported Adventure and Dungeon to OS/3; one of the most difficult tasks
was getting terminal I/O to work properly.
I remember at a software house where I was working for a while, there was
a Wang mini of some description, that some colleagues were using for development work.
One of them showed me a “Space Invaders” game running on one of the terminals. Then he pulled out the cable between the terminal and the main machine ... and the game kept right on playing.
Effectively, the terminal was a fully programmable computer in its own right. No “block mode” here -- the game was fully interactive, with all the interaction happening locally.
Having chatted with the Wang people, they talked us into representing
their little desktops in Denmark, and when they started making word processors, we took on those as well, and soon that was most of our
business.
I also had to battle Wang engineering to get proper font adjustments to accommodate the extra Danish vowels: æøå/ÆØÅ and get them correctly placed on the keyboard.
Having chatted with the Wang people, they talked us into representing
their little desktops in Denmark, and when they started making word
processors, we took on those as well, and soon that was most of our
business.
I remember I got a glimpse at some Wang assembly code once, and it looked remarkably like my impressions of IBM 360/370 assembler. I think Dr Wang
may have copied the IBM instruction set. Or at least large parts of it.
The Asianometry channel covered the history of Dr Wang and his company
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgDZQy0nN-Y>. Obviously a brilliant
engineer, who managed to be an astute businessman as well. But he insisted on passing control of the company to a son who was not nearly as astute.
I also had to battle Wang engineering to get proper font adjustments to
accommodate the extra Danish vowels: æøå/ÆØÅ and get them correctly
placed on the keyboard.
Now that the technical obstacles to support of such alphabets have disappeared with the advent of Unicode, you still see a cultural
reluctance among some to acknowledge their existence.
Keyboards was the big problem. The Norvegian Wang subsidiary had copied
the DecWriter Norvegian keyboards, which were really badly screwed up.
(And DEC in Denmark had accepted those Norvegian keyboards.) I had some
fun researching /standards/ for office keyboards to get something that
would work for office typists.
I recall having to use Wang wordprocessing. Besides many
disadvantages vs. Wordstar &/or WordPerfect, the terminals
needed two coax cables, one BNC, another TNC.
Yet other times they only needed one. What was the story with
the two needed, sometimes?
When I was introduced to the WPS in 1978, I had been using documention scripting languages for about 8 years, mostly in the form of the Univac Exec-8 @DOC program, which was great for programmers, but much more
suitable for technical documentation than for business correspondence.
WPS was mostly WYSIWYG, which made it much easier to use for office
people.
When Wang arrived, it owned this market by virtue of being first!
Wikipedia says: "WordPerfect 1.0 represented a significant departure
from the previous Wang standard for word processing."
When I was introduced to the WPS in 1978, I had been using documention LP>> scripting languages for about 8 years, mostly in the form of the Univac LP>> Exec-8 @DOC program, which was great for programmers, but much more
suitable for technical documentation than for business correspondence. LP>> WPS was mostly WYSIWYG, which made it much easier to use for office
people.
I wonder how office people collaborate on a document, though. How do you merge contributions from two or more contributors using a WYSIWYG app, without something equivalent to patch/diff?
When Wang arrived, it owned this market by virtue of being first!
Wikipedia says: "WordPerfect 1.0 represented a significant departure
from the previous Wang standard for word processing."
Notice they say “Wang standard”, not “standard”. The world’s most popular word processor app, right into at least the late
1980s, was IBM’s DisplayWrite. This was because it was a
close emulation of the DisplayWriter word-processing machine,
which was very popular in IBM shops (i.e. most of the mainframe
computing world). That was still a big enough
market to outweigh the consumer/SME PC market at the time.
This didn’t make it a good word processor; reviews regularly found it pretty horrible to use. But people brainw^H^H^H^H^H^Hindoctrinated into the IBM culture/ecosystem seemed to think it was great.
trivia: 1980, there was an effort to replace many of the internal microprocessors with various 801/risc implementations ... all with
common programming environment. For various reasons most of them
floundered. The 801/risc ROMP chip was suppose to be for the
Displaywriter followon, when that was canceled, they decide to pivot to
the Unix workstation market and got the company that had done the AT&T
Unix port to IBM/PC as PC/IX, to do one for ROMP ... which becomes PC/RT
and AIX. The follow-on was RS/6000 that Wang resold
...
In June 1991, Wang started reselling IBM computers, in exchange for IBM investing in Wang stock. Wang hardware strategy to re-sell IBM RS/6000s
also included further pursuit of UNIX software.
Wasn't RS/6000 what was in IBM's Internet routers at the time (1985-1995 IIRC)?
monday morning on the wall of conference room (on the other side of the
POK)
Gee, it's been 45 years, so my memory is just a bit shaky.
First, the systems you are comparing them to required that you have a PC
in the first place. The Wang 1200 WPS came out in 1976, the IBM 5150 did
not come out until 1981. Wordstar for CP/M came out in 1978. WordPerfect >first came out in 1980 (under the name SSI*WP) and became WordPerfect
when it moved to MS-DOS in 1982.
both Rochest/AS400 and POK/mainframe complain that they could meet
On 2025-02-09, David Lesher <wb8foz@panix.com> wrote:
As for the terminal wiring: I found a "maintenance manual"
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/wang/ois/742-0664-1_OIS140-145_Maintenance_19871120.pdf
... but that seems only to cover installation procedures. But I think
the coax wiring is described in
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/wang/vs/comms/742-1102_WangNet_Backbone_19850724.pdf
This describes an RF coax "loop" with branches. One cable is "outbound",
the other is "inbound".
My first visit to Wang Labs in Lowell, MA, USA was to do a Danish
language localization for the OIS-140 (Office Information System) in
late April 1980.
I also had to battle Wang engineering to get proper font adjustments to accommodate the extra Danish vowels: æøå/ÆØÅ and get them correctly placed on the keyboard.
i worked for a company that used a Wang system. the printers
they used were the band/hammer types. very loud and not very precise,
but they had a particular job which had to print out very thin labels (2 lines) and they had to hit those labels pretty spot on. i spent a lot
of time taking old printers apart and replacing worn out parts to get
them to stay on spec.
21 yrs ago.....
i worked for a company that used a Wang system. the printers
after i left they were still using that Wang system for maybe
about 10 years before they got it onto some emulator system and
they may still be using it - i haven't run into anyone from
the company in years but i only live a few miles away - they are
still in business.
When Wang arrived, it owned this market by virtue of being first!
Wikipedia says: "WordPerfect 1.0 represented a significant departure
from the previous Wang standard for word processing."
Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote or quoted:
When Wang arrived, it owned this market by virtue of being first!
Wikipedia says: "WordPerfect 1.0 represented a significant departure
from the previous Wang standard for word processing."
I just stumbled upon this gnarly reader's letter from 1980 in
"Kilobaud" (Microcomputing, November 1980, 7). Some dude wrote
about dropping a cool eight grand on an "Algorithmics system."
Back then, that was probably some fancy-pants word processor.
So, get this, the guy was totally bummed out 'cause his files kept
pulling a Houdini, and the whole shebang was a bear to operate.
It's a toss-up whether this cat was just too lazy to hit the
books and study the manual, or if the system was actually a
lemon. But I reckon the real issue was that it was 1980.
Since then, we've seen a boatload of upgrades that make these
programs a piece of cake for Joe Schmoe. Nowadays, software's
got more undo functions than a yoga class, GUI interfaces
slicker than a greased pig, WYSIWYG that's clearer than a Tahoe
mountain stream, and storage space cheaper than two-buck Chuck -
so you can back that thing up more times than a Kardashian posts
selfies, and kiss data loss goodbye. Not to mention standardized
clipboard metaphors, dialog boxes, and a whole enchilada of
other goodies.
Did you use an LLM to style this text, or did you drop these bizarre >analogies straight off your own dome?
ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:
Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote or quoted:
When Wang arrived, it owned this market by virtue of being first! >>Wikipedia says: "WordPerfect 1.0 represented a significant departure
from the previous Wang standard for word processing."
I just stumbled upon this gnarly reader's letter from 1980 in
"Kilobaud" (Microcomputing, November 1980, 7). Some dude wrote
about dropping a cool eight grand on an "Algorithmics system."
Back then, that was probably some fancy-pants word processor.
So, get this, the guy was totally bummed out 'cause his files kept
pulling a Houdini, and the whole shebang was a bear to operate.
It's a toss-up whether this cat was just too lazy to hit the
books and study the manual, or if the system was actually a
lemon. But I reckon the real issue was that it was 1980.
Since then, we've seen a boatload of upgrades that make these
programs a piece of cake for Joe Schmoe. Nowadays, software's
got more undo functions than a yoga class, GUI interfaces
slicker than a greased pig, WYSIWYG that's clearer than a Tahoe
mountain stream, and storage space cheaper than two-buck Chuck -
so you can back that thing up more times than a Kardashian posts
selfies, and kiss data loss goodbye. Not to mention standardized
clipboard metaphors, dialog boxes, and a whole enchilada of
other goodies.
Did you use an LLM to style this text, or did you drop these bizarre analogies straight off your own dome?
I should try to tone this down somewhat, i.e., too make it less
bizarre, either by manual post-processing or giving appropriate
instructions to the LLM.
| Sysop: | Tetrazocine |
|---|---|
| Location: | Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
| Users: | 8 |
| Nodes: | 8 (0 / 8) |
| Uptime: | 97:31:32 |
| Calls: | 161 |
| Files: | 21,502 |
| Messages: | 78,467 |