Wang Laboratories

Wang VS minicomputer

The Wang VS minicomputer computer was introduced in 1979, about the time as Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX. Its instruction set was compatible with the IBM 360 series but it did not run any IBM 360 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 market in general, and IBM in particular. While many programming languages were available, the VS was typically programmed in COBOL, and Wang put the bulk of its compiler development resources behind its COBOL compiler.

Related Topics:
Wang VS - Minicomputer - Digital Equipment Corporation - VAX - Instruction set - IBM 360 - Programming language - COBOL - Compiler

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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.'"

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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.

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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.

Related Topics:
MIS - Data processing - Fortune 1000 - Microcode

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