It’s official: A new Wang VS is born
May 17, 2005 – The join press release announcing the Jan 18 signing of the agreement between Getronics and TransVirtual Systems made it out today. You may view it here:
HTML at Getronics with a link to their PDF …GONE
or here:
HOLD THE PRESSES!
Mar 5, 2005 – A new chapter seems to be opening in the saga of the Wang VS! A New VS that runs independently of the legacy VS hardware is on the road to release. It uses Dell PowerEdge servers and Linux to provide an environment that is 100% binary compatible with the VS. It IPLs and runs the VS OS and all presently supported VS software. Software dependent on obsolete or rare I/O devices may not be supported. The New VS requires licensed software from TransVirtual Systems and Getronics (Wang). A joint announcement is working its way through Getronics corporate PR and is expected to be made public Real Soon Now™.
In addition, recent contact attempts by The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center and by TransVirtual Systems seem to reveal the existence of far more off-maintenance VS sites than heretofore suspected. The population of surviving VS sites may be TWICE what had been previously estimated.
New update on 07-Feb-01:
Four years and two days after I last updated What’s a Wang I have just a few brief comments to bring up to date anyone who may have spent the last four years in a cave.
Getronics, formerly Wang, has nearly completed its exit from the computer market. I estimate there are fewer than 1,000 VS systems still in operation worldwide, and the number is shrinking almost daily. There are still quite a few large VS sites in the world, and some of those may continue in operation for years to come, but for the rest of us the VS is all but gone. In the Greater Houston area, for instance, I know of no VS systems still running, and there seems to be no VS maintenance presence anymore (naturally). In this, Getronics has realized the negative sales goals set for the VS in the wake of the 1992 Wang bankruptcy. Corporate suits projected a 25% annual decline in VS revenues, and — surprise! surprise! — that is what has happened. I think I am the only person who pointed out during that time that negative sales goals are very easy to meet. It’s the positive sales goals that can be tough.
This is my present [2001] estimate of the VS population trend since 1990. The light columns are estimates while the dark columns have some basis in numbers reported publicly or privately.
Wang, now Getronics, has converted itself rather completely into what it has called a “network services” provider. It designs, builds, manages and maintains networks. Except for the small band of hardy souls in Tewksbury who keep the VS flame lit, and a few others around the world in VS maintenance and certain specialty roles, Getronics is now over 99% VS-free.
Original writeup, last updated 05-Feb-96 and now largely outdated:
Wang Laboratories, Inc., of Lowell, Massachusetts was once one of the great R&D centers of the U.S. technological phenomenon. Wang gave the world word processing, imaging and DP/telephony integration, among other things. Most people don’t know that SIMMs came from Wang, finally acknowledged in a legal case reportedly concluded only this year or last. Most people don’t know that OLE came from Wang, reportedly acknowledged in a recent settlement with Microsoft. And most technical people who have worked with Wang’s PACE database and subsequently moved on to mainstream RDBMS products have been sorely and rudely disappointed to find that the big name products were a technological step down (this is moderating in light of offerings of the last year or so, but in most products it is still not possible or easy to create a working, multitable app as it is in PACE).
Founded by Dr. An Wang in 1951, Wang Laboratories enjoyed great success in the 1970’s and 1980’s, first with the Wang 2200 computer system and later with the VS line of computer systems. The 2200 was a microcoded BASIC-only system that proved to be a Volkswagen of small computer systems. Something in the area of 65,000 were produced, and many are still running today. The VS was (and is) a true multitasking, multiuser data processing system supporting multiple programming languages under a decidedly proprietary operating system. Many tens of thousands were produced from 1978 through the present, and something like 20,000 may be in operation today.
The latter half of the 1980’s brought declining health for Dr. Wang, a resulting change in leadership for the company, a decidedly different playing field for computer systems, some incredibly bad strategic decisions and, finally, serious difficulties.
After being one of the last holdouts in the losing proprietary systems game, Wang declined in the late 1980’s until finally filing for protection under bankruptcy laws in 1992. Declaring at various times in various ways that it was no longer going to be a hardware manufacturer (what it always did best) and would henceforth be in the software and service business (what it always did least well) and, ahem, “business re-engineering” (excuse ME?), Wang has emerged on the far side of its difficulties as a sound, cash-rich company in the business of, um, let me see, er, well, hardware (among other things). Hmmm.
As those of us who have lived through much of this as customers or employees wonder what Wang is doing and where it may be going (does it really matter? yes, to some it does), the fact of the matter is that tens of thousands of Wang computer systems continue to defy all conventional wisdom and persist in the marketplace. Some small customers have no reason to throw out a system that does the job, thank you very much. Some large customers have discovered, much to everyone’s surprise, that at least some of the alternative systems aren’t up to replacing a big Wang VS system. More than a few customers in that situation are buying more and larger VS processors even as they fill their whiteboards with diagrams of their planned replacement systems from XYZ or ABC.
I haven’t been saving volumes of Access to Wang, so I’m at a loss to even put dates to the strange story of Wang’s disintegration and resurrection. I’ll fill that in as I run across the specifics (if you have any old publications that might help, or if you know any of the dates/names/events, please e-mail me).
What I’d really like to do is get a picture of who is out there using the Wang VS, where, how, what your plans are, etc., as well as whatever news and poop I can gather about what’s happening inside Wang, and publish the distillation here.