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Wang Laboratories

Wang Laboratories was a computer company founded in 1951 by Dr. An Wang. The company was successively headquartered in Cambridge (1954-1963), Tewksbury (1963-1976) and Lowell, Massachusetts (1976-1992). At its peak in the 1980s, it was earning revenues of $3 billion/year and employed over 30,000 people.

The company was always directed by Dr. Wang, who played a personal role in setting business strategy and product strategy and thus must be credited both with the company's successes and failures.

Dr. Wang took steps to ensure that the Wang family would retain control of the company even after going public. He created a second class of stock, class B, with higher dividends but only one-tenth the voting power of class C. The public mostly bought class B shares; the Wang family retained most of the class C shares. (The letters B and C were used to ensure that brokerages would fill any Wang stock orders with class B shares unless class C was specifically requested). Wang stock had been listed in the New York Stock Exchange, but this maneuver was not quite acceptable under NYSE's rules, and Wang was forced to delist with NYSE and relist on the more liberal American Stock Exchange.

Under his direction, the company went through several distinct transitions between different product lines.

Typesetters

The company's first major project was an electronic phototypesetter, the Linasec, introduced in 1964. It was developed under contract to Compugraphic, which retained the rights to manufacture the machine without royalty. Compugraphic exercised these rights, effectively forcing Wang out of the market.

Calculators

The Wang LOCI-2 (there had been a LOCI-1 but it was not a real product) was introduced in 1965 and was probably the first desktop calculator capable of computing logarithms, quite an achievement for a machine without any integrated circuits. The electronics included 1275 discrete transistors. It actually performed multiplication by adding logarithms, and roundoff in the display conversion was noticeable; 2 times 2 yielded 3.999999999.

From 1965 to about 1971, Wang was a calculator company, and a very well-regarded one. Wang calculators cost in the mid-four-figures, used Nixie tube readouts, performed transcendental functions, had varying degrees of programmability, and exploited magnetic-core memory in ingenious ways. Competition included HP, which introduced the HP9100A in 1968, and old-line calculator companies such as Monroe and word processing and did not foresee (and was unable to compete against) general personal computers with word processing software in the 1980s. This view is skewed, though, because word processing was not the mainstay of Wang's business by the time PCs began to gain in popularity. Although Wang manufactured PCs, its main business by the 1980s was its VS line of mainframe computer systems.

There were other factors, however. High among them was Dr. Wang's insistence that his son, Fred Wang, succeed him. Fred Wang was an intelligent, able, business-school graduate, "but by almost any definition," wrote Charles C. Kenney, "unsuited for the job in which his father had placed him." His assignment, first as head of R&D, then as president of the company, led to jealousy and to resignations by key R&D and business personnel.

One turning point occurred when Fred Wang was head of R&D. In October 1983, Wang Laboratories announced over twenty major hardware and software products. The announcement was well received, but very few of the products were close to completion and many of them had not even been started. All were delivered late and some were never delivered at all. In retrospect this was referred to as the "vaporware announcement," and it hurt the credibility of Fred Wang and Wang Laboratories.

In 1986 Fred Wang, then 36 years old, was installed as president of Wang Laboratories. Things did not go well. The company was soon clearly in decline and, on August 4th, 1989, Dr. Wang had to fire his son.

Wang Laboratories eventually filed for bankruptcy protection on August 18, 1992. The three Wang towers in Lowell, which originally cost $60 million to build and housed 4500 workers in over a million square feet (100,000 m²) of office space, were sold for $525,000. Wang itself would have bought the Towers property at the foreclosure sale but no one at Wang had anticipated that the final price would be so low, and so an opportunity to reaquire the Towers was lost.

The company emerged from bankruptcy a year or two later with $200 million in hand and embarked on a course of acquisition and self-reinvention, eschewing its former role as an innovative designer and manufacturer of computer and related systems. Later in the 1990s with the acquisition of the Olsy division of Olivetti the company changed its name to Wang Global. By then Wang had settled on "network services" as its new chosen business.

In 1999 Wang Global, by then back up to $3.5 billion in annual revenues, was acquired by Getronics N.V. of The Netherlands, a $1.5 billion network services company active only in certain parts of Europe.

The Wang VS mainframe computer product line, not actively marketed since the 1992 bankruptcy and now but a tiny portion of the Getronics business, survives to this day (Mar 2004) at a level somewhere in the vicinity of 500 to 1,000 systems worldwide. The most advanced VS model, capable of supporting over 1,000 users -- the VS18000 Model 950 -- was released in 1999, and smaller models based on the same CPU chip were released in 2000.