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Comment by Finnucane | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Yes, this. My father worked for Wang through the 1970s and he thought it was a huge mistake that An Wang handed over the company to his son Fred, instead of to a company veteran like J.F. Cunningham, who left around the time it became clear that Fred would be An Wang's successor.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-07-20-fi-6028-s...

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