Wang Laboratories

» see wang.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

in 1992 i was eight years old and six years from my first modem. wang sat in the part of office computing i can read about but cannot personally remember. by the time i opened a word processor for the first time, it was on a 486 running windows 3.1 in an internet cafe, and the word "wang" was not anywhere near it.

wang laboratories was founded in 1951 by an wang, a shanghai-born physicist who had invented the magnetic-core memory cell at harvard's computation lab in 1948. ibm licensed the patent for half a million dollars and built the whole minicomputer era on top of it. an wang took that money and built his own company. first calculators, then minicomputers. in 1976 wang shipped the word processing system: a dedicated terminal whose only job was to make typing letters and memos feel less like fighting a typewriter.

by the mid-eighties around eighty percent of the top 2,000 american corporations had wang word processors in the secretarial pool. revenue hit three billion dollars at peak with thirty-three thousand employees on payroll. the headquarters tower in lowell massachusetts still stands. an wang himself was inducted into the inventors hall of fame and named the wealthiest chinese-american alive.

~ the dossier ~

~ what killed it ~

two things happened at once. ibm shipped the pc in 1981 and within a few years multimate cloned the wang interface to run on it. the dedicated wang terminal was suddenly competing with a general-purpose machine that could also do spreadsheets and accounting. wang's internal answer was to keep selling proprietary minicomputers into a market that wanted commodity microprocessors.

the second thing was succession. an wang installed his son frederick as president in 1986 over the objections of his senior team. key executives left. an wang himself died of esophageal cancer in march 1990. by august 1992 the company filed chapter 11 with what was at the time among the larger tech bankruptcies of the era.

~ the long tail ~

wang emerged from chapter 11 in 1993 and renamed itself wang global. the dutch firm getronics bought the remains in 1999 for around two billion dollars. the wang name persisted as a getronics business unit for a few more years before being quietly retired. the word processor as a category became microsoft word.

the secretarial pool that wang built its empire on does not really exist anymore either. word processing became a thing every office worker does for themselves in word, badly.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »