WANG (and other) artifacts
This is a micro-film viewer that was used by WANG field engineers.
It is contained in a simple suit-case.
The micro-fiches replaced probably hundreds of manuals.
I now have almost all the micro-fiches that where used in the field.
(Courtesy Rob Hulleman, Mr Stenvers)
No doubt WANG had a lot of gadgets made over the years. I have quite a collection that are in a display cabinet in the museum.
(Courtesy John Martens, Belgium)
These nice pieces of crockery with the WANG logo were recently donated from Sweden.
(Courtesy Mr. Håkan Argéus)
There is small collection of (semi) mechanical calculators in the museum.
The one with the small, green display is a Friden 130 from 1963.
It was the first all electronic calculator with a 4 line CRT display. Although never used on the Institute, I did add this calculator because it has delay lines as memory.
Mind you, the delay lines are made of oridinary fench wire !
Please visit the site Vintage Calculator Web to learn more about this calculator.
(Courtesy Mr Horsman)
There are three working Data Storage cabinets in the museum. A DS came with a 1,2 Mb floppy drive, a tape unit for making back-ups and one or more hard drives. 80Mb of data could be stored on one tape
Over the years I have restored data from tape back-ups for several companies. The WANG equipment was long gone, but they kept the tapes. I can still restore data from DS tapes if needed.
More about WANG
Dr . WANG published a book called “Lessons”. The one on the image is the Dutch translation. If I am correct, all WANG employees got a copy. He is named as “The godfather of Word Processing” on the cover.
If you would like to know more about the story of WANG, you should see to get a copy of “Riding the runaway horse”. I was told that it is out of print, but perhaps some bookstores might still have it. This excellent book is written by Charles C. Kenny and covers the whole story of Wang Laboratories
Publ. Little and Brown, ISBN 0-316-48919-0