Wang Laboratories

From Free net encyclopedia

Image:Wanglogo.png
Wang logo circa 1980.

Image:Wanglogo1970.png
Wang logo circa 1970.

Usage restricted. Trademarks on this page belong to their owner. See Wikipedia:Image use policy.


Wang Laboratories was a computer company founded in 1951 by Dr. An Wang and Dr. G. Y. Chu. The company was successively headquartered in Cambridge (1954-1963), Tewksbury (1963-1976) and Lowell, Massachusetts (1976-1992). At its peak in the 1980s, it was earning revenues of $3 billion/year and employed over 30,000 people.

The company was always directed by Dr. Wang, who played a personal role in setting business strategy and product strategy and thus must be credited both with the company's successes and failures.

Dr. Wang took steps to ensure that the Wang family would retain control of the company even after going public. He created a second class of stock, class B, with higher dividends but only one-tenth the voting power of class C. The public mostly bought class B shares; the Wang family retained most of the class C shares. (The letters B and C were used to ensure that brokerages would fill any Wang stock orders with class B shares unless class C was specifically requested). Wang stock had been listed in the New York Stock Exchange, but this maneuver was not quite acceptable under NYSE's rules, and Wang was forced to delist with NYSE and relist on the more liberal American Stock Exchange.

Under his direction, the company went through several distinct transitions between different product lines.

Contents

[edit]

Typesetters

The company's first major project was an electronic phototypesetter, the Linasec, introduced in 1964. It was developed under contract to Compugraphic, which retained the rights to manufacture the machine without royalty. Compugraphic exercised these rights, effectively forcing Wang out of the market.

[edit]

Calculators

The Wang LOCI-2 (there had been a LOCI-1 but it was not a real product) was introduced in 1965 and was probably the first desktop calculator capable of computing logarithms, quite an achievement for a machine without any integrated circuits. The electronics included 1275 discrete transistors. It actually performed multiplication by adding logarithms, and roundoff in the display conversion was noticeable; 2 times 2 yielded 3.999999999.

From 1965 to about 1971, Wang was a calculator company, and a very well-regarded one. Wang calculators cost in the mid-four-figures, used Nixie tube readouts, performed transcendental functions, had varying degrees of programmability, and exploited magnetic core memory in ingenious ways. Competition included HP, which introduced the HP9100A in 1968, and old-line calculator companies such as Monroe and Marchant.

Wang calculators were at first sold to scientists and engineers, but the company later won a solid niche in financial-services industries, which had previously relied on complicated printed tables for mortgages and annuities.

One perhaps apocryphal story tells of a banker who spot-checked a Wang calculator against a mortgage table and found a discrepancy. The calculator was right, the printed tables were wrong, and the company's reputation was made.

In the early seventies, Dr. Wang believed that calculators would become unprofitable low-margin commodities, and decided to exit the calculator business.

[edit]

Word Processors

The Wang word processor was designed by Harold Koplow and David Moros, who began by first writing the user's manual. This has long been known, and regarded as a brilliant design strategy. But it was apparently not a deliberate one. A 2002 Boston Globe article refers to Koplow as a "wisecracking rebel" who "was waiting for dismissal when, in 1975, he developed the product that made computers popularly accessible."

In Koplow's words, "Dr. Wang kicked me out of marketing. I, along with Dave Moros was relegated to Long Range Planning—'LRPed'. This, up until then, was tantamount to being fired: 'here is a temporary job until you find another one in some other company.'"

Although he and David Moros were indeed told to design a word processing machine, they were given no resources. They perceived the assignment as busywork. They went ahead anyway, wrote the manual, and convinced Dr. Wang to turn it into a real project. The word processing machine—the Wang WPS—was introduced in June 1976 and was an instant success, as was its successor, the 1977 Wang OIS (Office Information System).

These products were technological breakthroughs in their day. They were multi-user systems. Each "workstation" looked like a typical terminal of its day, but contained its own Z80 microprocessor and 64K of RAM (roughly comparable in power to a typical 1982 IBM PC). Disk storage was centralized in a "master" unit that was shared by the workstations, and connection was via high-speed dual coax. Multiple OIS "masters" could be networked to each other, allowing file sharing among hundreds of users. And the systems could be easily operated and administered by office personnel without special training (in the days before schools taught "computer literacy").

All software for the systems was developed by Wang Laboratories, and the operating system, file formats, and electronic interface specification were closely held proprietary secrets. Wang did not want third parties developing for or interconnecting with its systems. (This was relaxed somewhat in the late eighties).

[edit]

Minicomputers

On its journey from calculators and word processing to serious data processing Wang developed and marketed several lines of small computer system, some of which were WP-based and some of which were DP-based. Instead of a clear, linear progression, the product lines overlapped and in some cases borrowed technology from each other.

The most identifiable Wang minicomputer performing recognizable data processing was the Wang 2200, which appeared in May, 1973. Microcoded to run interpretive BASIC, about 65,000 systems were shipped in its lifetime and it found wide use in small and medium-size businesses worldwide. The 2200 evolved to support up to 16 workstations and utilized commercial disk technologies that appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Overshadowed by the Wang VS mainframe, the 2200 languished as a cost-effective but forgotten solution in the hands of the customers who had it. In the late 1980s Wang revisited the 2200 for one last dip in the revenue well, offering 2200 customers a new 2200 CS with bundled maintenance for less than customers were then paying just for maintenance of their aging 2200 systems. The 2200 CS was accompanied by updated disk units and other peripherals, and most 2200 customers able to write their signatures on the contracts moved up to the 2200 CS, after which Wang dusted off its hands and never again developed or marketed any new 2200 products. In 1997 Wang reported having about 200 2200 systems still under maintenance around the world. Throughout, Wang had always offered maintenance services for the 2200.

The Wang OIS (Office Information System) was heavily WP oriented and featured Wang's "Glossary" language, a system of programming that fit into the WP model and was easy enough to master that secretaries commonly used Glossary to extend the functionality of the document management and manipulation provided by the OIS. Like the Wang 2200, the OIS was characterized by evolution into a 16-user system. Oddly, the OIS overlapped the Wang VS, and familiar features of the latter such a dual-coax connections to workstations and printers, were things migrated from the developing OIS to the VS. Buried deep in the VS microcode are entire pieces of OIS code, probably because WP did not figure into the original design of the VS but was added later.

Wang also had a line called Alliance, which may have been more closely related to the VS than to earlier systems, but very little information is presently available about it.

[edit]

Wang VS mainframe

The Wang VS mainframe computer was introduced in 1978, about the time as Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX, and continues in use 27 years later. Its instruction set was compatible with the IBM 360 series but it did not run any IBM 360 system software. The VS operating system and all system software were built from the ground up to support interactive users as well as batch operations. The VS was aimed directly at the business data processing market in general, and IBM in particular. While many programming languages were available, the VS was typically programmed in COBOL. Other languages supported in the VS integrated development environment included Assembler, COBOL 74, COBOL 85, BASIC, RPG II, C, PL/I, FORTRAN, Glossary, MABASIC and Procedure (what would be called a scripting language in *nix systems). PASCAL was also supported for I/O coprocessor development. The Wang PACE (Professional Application Creation Environment) 4GL and database was used from the mid-1980s onward by customers and third party developers to build complex applications sometimes involving many thousands of screens, hundreds of distinct application modules, and serving many hundreds of users. Substantial vertical applications were developed for the Wang VS by third party software houses throughout the 1980s in COBOL, PACE, BASIC, PL/I and RPG II.

[edit]

Going after IBM

Dr. Wang felt a personal sense of rivalry with IBM, partly as a result of heavy-handed treatment by IBM in 1955-6 over the rights to his magnetic-core patents. (This encounter formed the subject of a long chapter in Wang's own book, Lessons.) According to Charles C. Kenney, "Jack Connors remembers being in Wang's office one day when the Doctor pulled out a chart on which he had plotted Wang's growth and projected that Wang Laboratories would overtake IBM sometime in the middle of the 1990s. 'He had kept it a long time,' says Connors. 'And he believed it.'"

Wang was one of the first computer companies to advertise on television, and the first to run an ad during the Super Bowl. Their first ad literally cast Wang Laboratories as David and IBM as Goliath. A later ad depicted Wang Laboratories as a helicopter gunship taking aim at IBM.

Wang wanted to compete against IBM as a computer company, selling directly to MIS departments. Before the VS, however, Wang Laboratories was not taken seriously as a computer company. The calculators, word processing systems and OIS were sold into individual departments, bypassing the corporate data-processing decision-makers. The chapter in Wang's book dealing with them shows that he saw them only as "a beachhead in the Fortune 1000." The Wang VS was Wang's entrée into IT departments. In his book, Dr. Wang notes that, to sell the VS, "we aggressively recruited salesmen with strong backgrounds in data processing... who had experience dealing with MIS executives, and who knew their way around Fortune 1000 companies." As the VS took hold, the word processor and OIS lines were phased out. The word processing software continued, in the form of a loadable-microcode environment that allowed VS workstations to take on the behavior of traditional Wang WP terminals to operate with the VS and use it as a document server.

Wang made inroads into IBM and DEC markets in the 1980s, but didn't have a serious impact on IBM's mainframe market due to self-limiting factors. Even though Dr. Wang wanted to compete with IBM, too many Wang salespeople were incompletely trained on the significant DP capabilities of the VS. In many instances the VS ran smaller enterprises up to about $500 million/year and in larger organizations found use as a gateway to larger corporate mainframes, handling workstation pass-through and massive print services.

At Exxon Company USA, for instance, 13 1985-top-of-the-line VS300s at the Houston headquarters were used in the 1980s and into the 1990s to receive mainframe reports and make them viewable online by executives.

At Mellon Mortgage 18 VS systems from the smallest to the largest were used as the enterprise mortgage origination, servicing, finance, documentation and hedge system and also for mainframe gateway services for logon and printing. Between Mellon Mortgage and parent Mellon Bank, their network contained 45 VS systems and the Bank portion of the network supported about 16,000 Wang Office users for email, report distribution and scheduling.

At Kent and KTec Electronics, two related Houston companies, separate VS clusters were the enterprise systems, handling distribution, manufacturing and accounting, with significant EDI capability for receiving customer forecasts, sending invoices, and sending purchase orders and receiving shipping notifications. Both systems ran the GEISCO EDI package. Kent, which grew to $600 million/year, ran the Arcus distribution software in COBOL and KTec, which grew to $250 million/year, ran the CAELUS MRP system for manufacturing in BASIC.

The high water mark of the VS in the marketplace was probably about 30,000 systems operating worldwide at one time in the mid-to-late 1980s, serving at least several million desktop users.

[edit]

Decline and fall

The decline and fall of Wang Laboratories can be seen from a number of viewpoints. A common view within the PC community is that the company failed because it specialized in computers designed specifically for word processing and did not foresee (and was unable to compete against) general personal computers with word processing software in the 1980s. This view is skewed, though, because word processing was not the mainstay of Wang's business by the time PCs began to gain in popularity. Although Wang manufactured PCs, its main business by the 1980s was its VS line of mainframe systems.

The fact is that all the manufacturers of large computer systems uniformly failed to recognize the potential of the emerging PC technology as something to integrate into their repertoire. The large machine vendors eventually and grudgingly paid lip service to the PC simply by developing PC emulators of their proprietary and dedicated terminals or workstations. Thus, IBM offered the IRMA card to turn a PC into a workstation emulator and Wang offered the WLOC card to do the same for their systems. File transfer was slow in coming and in the Wang VS community several third parties filled the gap with software more capable than that offered by Wang. Any of the large system manufacturers could have viewed the PC as a ready-made, microcode-loadable outboard processor and integrated it into their systems, but none seems to have done so. All eventually manufactured PCs, eventually settling on IBM PC compatibility, but in the large-system manufacturing field PCs were regarded more as an annoyance than as potential resources to be integrated into the mainframe scheme of things.

There were other factors in Wang's decline, however. High among them was Dr. Wang's insistence that his son, Fred Wang, succeed him. Fred Wang was an intelligent, able, business-school graduate, "but by almost any definition," wrote Charles C. Kenney, "unsuited for the job in which his father had placed him." His assignment, first as head of R&D, then as president of the company, led to jealousy and to resignations by key R&D and business personnel.

One turning point occurred when Fred Wang was head of R&D. In October 1983, Wang Laboratories announced over twenty major hardware and software products. The announcement was well received, but very few of the products were close to completion and many of them had not even been started. All were delivered late and some were never delivered at all. In retrospect this was referred to as the "vaporware announcement," and it hurt the credibility of Fred Wang and Wang Laboratories.

In 1986 Fred Wang, then 36 years old, was installed as president of Wang Laboratories. Things did not go well. The company was soon clearly in decline and, on August 4th, 1989, Dr. Wang had to fire his son.

Wang Laboratories eventually filed for bankruptcy protection on August 18, 1992. The three Wang towers in Lowell, which originally cost $60 million to build and housed 4,500 workers in over a million square feet (100,000 m²) of office space, were foreclosed and sold for $525,000. Wang itself would have bought the towers property at the foreclosure sale but no one at Wang had anticipated that the final price would be so low, and so an opportunity to reacquire the towers was lost.

The company emerged from bankruptcy a year or two later with $200 million in hand and embarked on a course of acquisition and self-reinvention, eschewing its former role as an innovative designer and manufacturer of computer and related systems. Later in the 1990's with the acquisition of the Olsy division of Olivetti the company changed its name to Wang Global. By then Wang had settled on "network services" as its new chosen business.

In 1999 Wang Global, by then back up to $3.5 billion in annual revenues, was acquired by Getronics N.V. of The Netherlands, a $1.5 billion network services company active only in certain parts of Europe.

The Wang VS mainframe computer product line, not actively marketed since the 1992 bankruptcy and now but a tiny portion of the Getronics business, survives to this day (Feb 2006) at a level somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000 to 2,000 systems worldwide. The most advanced legacy VS model, capable of supporting over 1,000 users -- the VS18000 Model 950 -- was released in 1999, and smaller models based on the same CPU chip were released in 2000 -- the VS6760 and the VS6780. A completely new line of Wang VS was recently introduced in 2005, using completely new hardware.

[edit]

Rebirth of the Wang VS

In 2005 Getronics announced New VS, a product that is said to seamlessly run the VS OS and all VS software. It is based on a hardware abstraction layer for Intel x86 and IBM POWER. The product is a joint commercial effort of Getronics and TransVirtual Systems, developer of the virtualization technology used. In 2006 the New VS was officially designated the "VS22000" family by Getronics, with eighteen model variants of packaging and performance available from both companies.

Wang VS conversions (or "migrations") have historically been fraught with difficulties, risk, and cost. Wang VS OS, workstation, compiler language and database functionality have usually embodied extensions that have been difficult to duplicate in target systems for replatforming. VS software can be run on the New VS, however, without program or data conversion.

The New VS consists of virtualization software running on specially configured hardware platforms and standard Wang VS system software. Though built from mainstream PC or PowerPC server hardware, the requirements for very specific configurations require that the hardware platform be provided or approved by Getronics and TransVirtual Systems. The New VS is not offered without fault-tolerant disk storage, robust remote access features, and substantial main memory, all things that were either not available in the legacy VS line or were extraordinarily expensive.

The New VS is capable of interoperating with SCSI-based Wang VS tape and disk drives, which provide a means of restoring VS files from standard backup tapes or copying VS disk drives. It can also share multihost RAID with a legacy VS for high-speed file transfer. Wang networking and clustering are supported using TCP/IP instead of legacy VS synchronous lines and dedicated FDDI.

The New VS reportedly runs VS software with higher CPU and disk I/O performance than the fastest legacy VS, the VS18950, released in 1999.

[edit]

External links

nl:Wang Laboratories pl:Wang Laboratories

Retrieved from "http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/Wang_Laboratories"