I've got a Wang OS

[joejacksmalls]

I've recently acquired some Wang Diskettes. Its a "Wang PC 200-300" OS, I've never seen or heard of it before. I'd like to contribute the set.

[Hot Trout]

We would love to have them.

[PMJPlay]

"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, Massachusetts (1954–1963), Tewksbury, Massachusetts (1963–1976), and finally in Lowell, Massachusetts (1976–1997). At its peak in the 1980s, Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of $3 billion and employed over 33,000 people. It was one of the leading companies during the time of the Massachusetts Miracle.

The company was always directed by Dr. Wang, who was described as an "indispensable leader" and played a personal role in setting business and product strategy. Under his direction, the company went through several distinct transitions between different product lines.

Wang Laboratories filed for bankruptcy protection in August 1992. After emerging from bankruptcy, the company eventually changed its name to Wang Global. In 1999, Wang Global was acquired by Getronics of The Netherlands."

The original Wang PC

"An Wang had initially refused to develop an IBM-compatible PC, due to his personal dislike of IBM, even though his son Fred had pitched the idea.

The original Wang PC was released to counter the IBM PC which had gained wide acceptance in the market for which Wang traditionally positioned the OIS system. It was based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor, a slightly faster CPU than the IBM PC's 8088. A hardware/software package that permitted the Wang PC to act as a terminal to the OIS and VS products was available. The hardware component, the first version was made of two large add-in boards called the WLOC (Wang Local Office Connection), contained a Z-80 processor and 64k of memory.

One of the distinguishing features of the Wang PC was the system software. Similar to the Wang VS minicomputer, the command line was not immediately evident. Everything could be run from menus, including formatting a disk. Furthermore, each item on a menu could be explained by hitting a dedicated Help key on the keyboard. This software was later sold in MS-DOS compatible form for non Wang hardware.

The Wang word processing software was also very graphical. The keyboard had 16 function-keys and, unlike WordStar, the popular word processor of the day, control key combinations were not required to navigate the system. The f-keys had the word processing functions labeled on them.

However, the biggest stumbling block was that - despite being a fully compliant MS-DOS system - it was not compatible with the IBM PC at the hardware level. This was a problem because MS-DOS was rarely used as anything more than a simple program loader; complex software (spreadsheets, Flight Simulator, etc.) could only obtain acceptable performance by direct manipulation of the hardware. Wang used a 16-bit data bus instead of the 8-bit data bus used by IBM, arguing that applications would run much faster since most operations required I/O (disk, screen, keyboard, printer). With this 16-bit design, Wang used peripheral hardware devices, such as the Wang PC display adapter, that were not compatible with their counterparts in the IBM PC line. This meant that the vast library of software available for the IBM PC could not be directly run on the Wang PC. Only those programs that were either written specifically for the Wang PC or ported from the IBM PC were available. A basic word processing package developed by Wang and Microsoft's Multiplan spreadsheet were the two commonly marketed software products. Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase II were also available. This dearth of application software led to the early demise of the original Wang PC, and it was replaced by an Intel 80286 based product that was fully plug compatible with the IBM PC. The unique system software was available at extra cost.

Most Wang PCs were released with a monochrome graphics adapter that supported a single video mode with text and graphics planes that could be scrolled independently, unlike IBM-compatible PCs of the time which required selecting a specific video mode to allow graphics. A color graphics adapter and Wang-branded color monitor were also available.

An ergonomic feature of the Wang PC was the monitor arm that clamped to the desk and held the monitor above and a system clamp that attached to the side of the desk and held the rather large computer box. By using these, there was nothing on your desk except the keyboard."

IBM compatible Wang PCs

"After it became clear that it had been a mistake to ignore the issue of PC compatibility, Wang belatedly released an emulation board for Wang PC that enabled operation of many PC compatible software packages. The board accomplished this by monitoring all I/O and memory transactions (visible in those days before North/South bridge chips to any board plugged into a slot on the expansion bus) and generating an NMI whenever an operation was deemed to involve an incompatible device, requiring emulation.

For example: the floppy controller circuitry on the Wang PC was similar to that of the IBM PC but involved enough design differences that PC compatible software attempting to manipulate it directly would fail. Wang's PC emulation hardware would detect I/O and memory operations involving the addresses associated with the floppy controller in the IBM PC and generate an NMI. The NMI handler would immediately be activated (the exception vector having been appropriated during system init to point to ROM routines on the emulation board instead of the NMI routine in the PC BIOS) and would then update an internal representation of the IBM PC floppy controller and manipulate the real controller to reflect its state. Reads were satisfied in a similar way, by forcing an NMI, decoding the machine code indicated by the Instruction Pointer at the time of the fault, and then obtaining the desired info and updating the CPU registers accordingly before resuming the executing program.

The PC emulation board thus enabled execution of an impressive number of applications by presenting "virtualized" PC compatible hardware devices to them: a monochrome text-only video controller, a floppy controller, UARTs, DMA controller, parallel port, keyboard controller, etc.

IBM-PC Emulation on the 8086-based Wang PC was working fairly reliably when IBM released their 80286-based PC-AT. Wang's answer was the 80286-based Wang APC which not only perpetuated the PC incompatibility at the hardware level but revealed an unexpected wrinkle in the hitherto successful PC emulation strategy: the 8086 decoded and executed instructions on-the-fly and was therefore able to respond to NMI on every instruction boundary, but the 80286 decoded and queued instructions in a pipeline whose depth varied with each CPU-mask stepping but which always prevented timely NMI execution. Wang's engineers came up with (and later patented) a rather devious instruction-prefetch monitor that managed to cope with that challenge at the expense of a modest performance penalty.

Further iterations of the PC line were released with model number was PC-240. These later models booted directly into MS-DOS (or another compatible operating system) and supported ISA-standard expansion cards.

This PC-240 still wasn't entirely IBM PC standard as the keyboard, although being a standard PC/AT device, allowed for VS compatibility with 24 function keys rather than the normal 12, and a number of Wang VS specific keys. There was also a slight difference in CPU interrupts from IBM standard, so some software had compatibility issues.

VS connectivity was via an ISA based VS-terminal card, or via LightSpeed, the networked VS Terminal Emulator, over an IPX-based Ethernet connection. Originally the PC-240 came with a Wang specific Hercules Graphics Card and compatible screen, which also acted as a keyboard extension, meaning the base unit could be kept some distance from the screen. This was later replaced with an EGA card and screen.

Around 1991, Wang released the PC350-16 and PC350-40, which were Intel 80386 based, clocked at 16 MHz and 40 MHz respectively. They used the same VS compatible keyboard as the PC-240. They had a maximum of 4 megabytes of RAM and came with VGA screens as standard. They were generally supplied with MS-DOS, and Windows 3.0.

The 350-16 had an interesting bug where, occasionally, the machine would just freeze entirely and not even boot up if turned off and on at the mains. Although it would power on, the BIOS just didn't start. The solution was to turn on the machine at the mains and hold down the power button for 30 seconds, at which point it would normally start. It was suggested that this was due to an under-valued capacitor in the power circuit. This problem appeared to be resolved in the 350-40, which had a different PSU.

In 1992 Wang marketed a PC-compatible based on the Intel 80386SX processor, which they called the Alliance 750CD. It was clocked at 25 MHz and had a socket for an 80387 math coprocessor. It came with 2 megabytes of installed RAM, and was expandable to 16 megabytes using SIMM memory cards (a Wang invention[18] that became an industry standard). It had a 1.44 megabyte floppy disk drive, an internal 80 megabyte hard disk, and a CD-ROM drive. Five expansion slots were built-in. It came with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 operating systems.


In 1994 Wang released the slimline Alliance 750CD 80486 based PC in the United Kingdom. These machines used standard PC/AT keyboards and were entirely IBM compatible, shipping with MSDOS 5.0 and Windows 3.11 as standard. The only unusual feature was that system BIOS settings and the real-time clock were maintained by four standard AA batteries as opposed to a more typical solution — such as a specialty battery pack or lithium battery. While originally offered with a 33 MHz 80486DX, the 750CD could be upgraded to later Socket 3 processors such as the 80486DX2 through the use of third party CPU upgrade adapters or interposers. This allowed upgrading to speeds beyond 50 MHz without overclocking, or alternatively the potential for speeds in excess of 100 MHz with overclocking, dependent on the processor used."

Wang Freestyle Laptop

"Wang Freestyle was a 1990 product consisting of:

- A tablet and stylus for written annotation of any file that could be displayed on the PC
- A phone handset for voice annotation, but not voice communication. Demonstrated strongly in conjunction with the tablet for explaining the text annotations
- email, via Wang OFFICE, of the resulting document set.
The product was not a success in anything except marketing terms. The article at University of Southern California (USC) shows the symptoms of the failure:

The $1.2 million USC system includes a VS 7150 mid-range computer; 30 image workstations, 25 with Freestyle capabilities; a laser printer; five endorsers; and five document scanners. Initial storage for document images is eight gigabytes of magnetic disk storage.

Only 25 of the stations were Freestyle stations. The system was so costly, even in the context of a Wang Integrated Imaging System, that Freestyle was only affordable for highly specialized or very senior staff. Apart from USC, unusual in that it was deployed at clerical level, it was sold as a C-Level tool for C grades to communicate with other C Grades. This reduced the marketplace immediately from the mass market where the system would have been effective."

-Wikipedia

[crustyasp46]

Very good read, Phil sir. And for the effort.