[HN Gopher] The Wang 2200 (2008)
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The Wang 2200 (2008)
Author : ok123456
Score : 53 points
Date : 2022-07-25 14:34 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wang2200.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wang2200.org)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| A few years ago I saw a concert in the Shubert Theater, in Boston
| MA.
|
| On my way out, coming down the stairs from the balcony, was a
| portrait of Dr. Wang!
| Koshkin wrote:
| Dr. Wang's pithy quotes:
|
| https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/an-wang-quotes
| D-Coder wrote:
| I worked with Wangs back in the day, in BASIC.
|
| I remember reading the manual for a customer's machine (2200T?
| aka "Model T", or maybe 2200VP, aka "2200 very profitable"). The
| manual indicated that several disk operations were implemented in
| an extra chip in the new model.
|
| Some time later, their machine kind of broke. I experimented and
| discovered that only the disk operations were not working,
| everything else was fine.
|
| I was pleased as a software engineer to be able to tell the
| customer, "Call Wang maintenance and tell them the XYZ chip is
| fried."
| jmclnx wrote:
| I used to be an operator (admin), for the 2200, I forgot the
| application it ran but I think it was some kind of billing and it
| would dial out to get/receive data. It was a very nice machine,
| the application was written in Wang Basic.
|
| But I had a copy of their IN/ix 16 bit UNIx that ran on their
| PCs, being a dummy I tossed the hardware when I moved many years
| ago :(
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Lesser known was the language/compiler combo created for it:
| Wang-69.
| Archelaos wrote:
| Our school had a Wang 2200 and several Commodore CBM 4016. Those
| were the computers I started programming with in the early 80s.
| The best thing about the Wang was its typeball printer. It
| sounded like World War 1.
| dcminter wrote:
| This makes me nostalgic so the following might get a little
| long...
|
| My late father, after a short stint with Wang, set himself up as
| an independent developer creating bespoke software (usually book-
| keeping) for smaller companies in Wang 2200 BASIC.
|
| As a consequence these machines regularly turned up in our small
| middle-class living room. I pretty much learnt to write on green-
| lined fanfold paper and I played in the huge boxes that they
| arrived in. Family legend has it that at a very tender age when
| asked what I wanted for Christmas I answered "pooter" ( a story
| later embellished further as that having been my first word).
|
| Enjoyable memories:
|
| The terminal's keyboard had a "TRON" key (TRace ON and there was
| a TROFF key for TRace OFF, which caused the line of BASIC code
| executing to be displayed on the screen).
|
| Those little compact cassette drives in the terminal were
| intended for data only, but in practice didn't get much use once
| (8 inch) floppy disks were added. They may have had some superior
| tape speed but the media was otherwise a completely normal (but
| very short) compact cassette. My father had various programs
| recorded from the radio on spare ones at about 10 minutes per
| cassette or so (both sides) with the inevitable missed bit while
| he'd swapped tapes. Frustrating to listen to on long car
| journeys.
|
| When you activated the cassette tape drive in the terminal, the
| fields from the electric drive motors distorted the display on
| the adjacent CRT.
|
| At one point we had an Apple II system on trial, but nothing came
| of that (I don't know why), and then a ZX81 that was sufficiently
| close to being a toy that it ended up in my own hands at the age
| of 9 and I taught myself to program from the manual.
|
| I have to mention that mentioning in the school playground that
| my Dad "programmed Wangs" did not go down particularly well.
|
| Once the IBM PC arrived on the scene it was fairly obvious that
| the Wang days were numbered, but a licensed emulation package
| from Niakwa allowed my Dad to keep on plugging away in 2200 BASIC
| for a good long while after that.
|
| If I remember rightly the Niakwa system was originally run on the
| Wang PC, a weird DOS based but not IBM compatible system
| (mentioned in other threads here). I had the fun of teaching
| myself how to use a demo version of AutoCAD on that machine and
| then my Dad had me demo it to a manufacturing customer. That demo
| went down very well, from a barely-teenaged kid I guess it proved
| ease of use!
|
| Some while later, during a summer break from college, my Dad
| asked me to see if I thought I could convert one of his old
| programs to a more modern language. I was given access to one of
| the real Wang 2200 MVP terminals at a customer site to take a
| look through the code. Pure spaghetti code! No comments (REM
| statements) to give me a clue, all sorts of clever PACK/UNPACK
| processing to make maximum use of what had originally been very
| restricted amounts of memory. It didn't help that the terminal
| was in a cupboard with a movement detector on the light so I had
| to stand up and wave my arms around every five minutes or so when
| that turned off. He didn't seem too surprised when I threw in the
| towel.
|
| A different client had a big MVP machine (with capacity for eight
| terminals I think) that they wanted to get rid of - some college
| friends and I picked it up and we had it set up in our student
| house. It sounded like a jet engine winding up when you turned it
| on.
|
| Some of the customers were a nuisance, but others became family
| friends. His last and best, the one to whom I demonstrated
| AutoCAD, is still in business, and attended my father's funeral.
|
| I kind of miss those noisy old machines. Not as much as I miss my
| Dad though.
| jes wrote:
| > _... all sorts of clever PACK /UNPACK processing to make
| maximum use of what had originally been very restricted amounts
| of memory._
|
| Up thread, I mentioned that I helped with the development of a
| C language interpreter for BASIC-2.
|
| You're exactly right about how tight memory was.
|
| One of guys at TOM Software, "Russ," used to keep a
| 1-dimensional array variable in his code. I remember one day we
| did something to the interpreter that wound up giving BASIC-2
| programs a few additional bytes of program storage space. Russ
| just about had an orgasm as he updated his "free space"
| variable. When I asked him about it, he indicated that "When I
| get enough free memory, I can implement another feature!"
|
| Way to take one for the team, Russ, wherever the hell you are
| these days!
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I'm a big fan of Wang, especially the PC-compatibles that came
| out in the later 80s. Jan van de Veen[0] has a Wang-themed
| website/personal museum with some great pics.
|
| [0]: http://home.wxs.nl/~janvdv/wang/wangmuseummenu.htm
| Finnucane wrote:
| In the mid 1980s I worked for a guy who did COBOl programming
| on Wang VS systems. I recall setting up a PC network for one of
| our clients. The Wang PC boxes were _huge_.
|
| The other thing I remember was that when An Wang announced his
| retirement no one had any confidence in Fred. My boss and our
| more clued-in clients all thought Fred was going to run the
| company into the ground, adn they were right.
| georgia_peach wrote:
| To be fair, I think An shot himself in the foot long before
| the boy took over--by making a "PC" with a 16-bit bus when
| the standard was 8-bit. From a computer engineering
| perspective, it was the obvious and correct thing to do. From
| a business perspective, it was an epic fail.
| Finnucane wrote:
| that could be--it's been a long time, but my memory is that
| the network cards were Wang-specific, you couldn't use
| generic pc cards. They really did not get the whole PC
| thing. They'd basically invented office automation, but
| couldn't get to the next stage.
| georgia_peach wrote:
| DOS was barely an operating system, so the programs had
| to bundle their own drivers & speak directly to the
| hardware for anything more than disk/compute. Because of
| this, that one little 8/16 change cut Wang off from the
| lion's share of the PC software library--first man to the
| gold rush, but without a pick or a shovel.
|
| It's a shame they didn't make it though. From a technical
| perspective, the old man knew what he was doing.
| themadturk wrote:
| I worked for a law firm in the late 80s - early 90s that used a
| Wang VS system for data and word processing, before and until
| just after we installed a Novell LAN. My boss programmed the
| system using a language called SPEED-2, which I never managed to
| learn. We had a number of highly non-PC compatible Wang PCs for a
| time, and eventually started installing Wang terminal cards in
| standard PCs to link to the main system.
|
| My major memory of that time was doing backups with huge, multi-
| platter removable disk packs. Incrementals at noon every day,
| fulls one Sunday a month, and managing the offsite storage...such
| a pain.
| jes wrote:
| Here's some additional information on the SPEED-I and SPEED-II
| applications.[1]
|
| [1]. https://www.appx.com/history
| mikestew wrote:
| Wang did sell an IBM-compatible board after it was obvious that
| Wang wasn't going to win the desktop computing market. I had
| one of those boards, and the Wang to go with it; worked fine,
| and I don't ever recall any incompatibilities.
| jes wrote:
| Yep, SPEED-1 and SPEED-2 were products of a company called "TOM
| Software," where TOM was short for "The Office Manager."
|
| Here's a little inside baseball on that.
|
| TOM Software (Burien, Washington) had many applications written
| in Wang Basic-II. Sometime in 1983, or so, I hired on with TOM
| Software to help with finishing and porting an interpreter for
| Wang Basic-II to various small (and not so small) UNIX systems
| that UNIX system vendors provided to TOM Software in the hopes
| of getting some applications on their systems.
|
| It was a hugely fun time, working on that interpreter. It was
| all written in C, and unfortunately, it's wasn't as fast as we
| would have liked. It did work and we did ship it on a number of
| platforms. Machines like the Fortune 32:16, the Pixel, Zilog
| Z-8000 micro, Perkin-Elmer 8/32, and even a Burroughs system
| (wtf?)
|
| As I remember, the Wang VS system was released and was a
| competitor to the Wang 2200.
|
| There was another company, Niakawa (sp?) if I remember, that
| did have a fast port of the Wang Basic-II interpreter to
| Windows based systems.
|
| Towards the end of my time there, we were coding certain
| SPEED-1 subroutines directly in C in the interpreter. They
| could be called via a magic command ... "BOB-N", that was
| embedded in the interpreter. So you had BOB-1 XXX, BOB-2 XXX
| YYY, etc.
|
| There is a book by Payne and Payne called "Writing
| Interpreters," which if memory serves, kind of centers around
| Wang Basic-II. I think I still have a copy of it in my storage
| unit, but I might have chucked it. I didn't find it on Amazon
| when I just searched, so perhaps I'm wrong.
|
| It was really a good time for me. I learned a lot about writing
| interpreters and other V7-ish stuff working there.
| smarks wrote:
| The VS was more of a successor to the 2200 than a competitor.
| The 2200 was mostly a single-user system with a ROM-based
| (later, firmware-based) OS that simply ran a BASIC
| interpreter. Later versions (e.g., 2200 MVP) supported
| limited multi-terminal, multi-user capability, but it was
| essentially multiple independent BASIC interpreters, one per
| user.
|
| The VS came out a few years later and was an IBM 370-like
| machine in a minicomputer form factor. It supported 370-like
| assembly language and several compiled languages including
| COBOL, RPG-II, and BASIC. The BASIC was quite a bit different
| and considerably evolved compared to 2200 BASIC.
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