This page is to give thanks to the kind people who have donated time, loaned materials, or otherwise helped me in my efforts to understand, document, and archive the information on the Wang computer. In semi-chronological order:
- Susan Battle (nee Thomas)
What more could a guy ask for in a wife and best friend? Intelligence,
beauty, humor, kindness, and enduring patience, especially when it comes
to my preoccupation with decrepit computers.
Susan has let me indulge my child-like (childish?) fascination with old
computers, even when it has meant giving over large parts of the house
to cobweb ridden boxes of junk.I love you, Susan!
- Thomas Junker
... for running the The Unofficial WANG VS Information Center, keeping me in mind, and sending me leads.
- Merle Peirce
... for encouragement and sending me a matrix operations manual when I had no docs to keep me warm at night. Merle is associated with the Rhode Island Computer Museum, where the have quite a few interesting machines, including about a dozen Wang models.
- Will Jennings
... for surprising me by sending me a Wang-2 BASIC manual. It was interesting to see what Wang BASIC morphed into after I stopped using it.
- Jan van de Veen
... for encouragement and for help save some critical Wang documents. Jan has a great on-line Wang Museum.
- Max Rhodes
... for saving his granddad's Wang WCS/30, finding me, and meticulously disassembling and shipping it. This was my first reunion with a Wang after 20 years.
5/04: I donated the desk, floppy disk system, and hard disk system to Bruce Damer at the Digibarn
- Bob Eisenhauer
... for saving his Wang for 20 years and patiently waiting nearly two years for me to come around to pick it up. This Wang is much more similar to the one on which I first learned programming.
5/04: I donated the entire system to Bruce Damer at the Digibarn
- Carl Coffman
... for the ROM images and for sharing a lot of hard-earned insights into the Wang circuit implementation.
- Georg Schäfer
... for much encouragement over the years, and for obtaining a copy of the crucial 2200 Systems Maintenance Manual from Jan van de Veen. Without it, writing an emulator would have taken a LOT longer and would have been much less fun.
- Fritz Chwolka
... for scanning the crucial 2200 Systems Maintenance Manual. The scan came from a copy provided by Georg Schäfer, from an original manual that Jan van de Veen owns. It was in international triple play to get that document on this website.
- J. Carter ("Smokey") Thompson
... for sending me the 2200MVP Maintenance manual, and for generally keeping me excited about the project.
- Ernest R. Schreurs
... for taking the time to scan and send a number of manuals. BTW, Ernest has an ongoing project to emulate the Wang VS series of computers: http://home.planet.nl/~ernest/vs.html
- Max Blomme
... for generously loaning me some documents that have been an invaluable part of making the 2200 emulator more accurate and making the 2200VP mode possible. And that is the tip of the iceberg.
- Dave Angel
... for replying to my 2200/2200VP architecture questions with speed, accuracy and detail. It is amazing what he can recall 20 years after the fact.
- Bruce Damer
Bruce is the curator of the Digibarn, a fantastic open to the public computer museum located near Santa Cruz, California. He loaned to me a number of Wang 2200 disks and docs that I was able to scan and put up on this site. On short notice he was also able to give one of my Wang systems a new home when I moved.
- The wxWidgets team
... for working so hard and so long to put out a great open-source cross-platform GUI and application services framework. My previous emulator was written using straight Win32 calls; it was tedious and I regretted that it only ran on Windows. Getting the Wang emulator up and running has been a breeze in comparison. I look forward to using wxWidgets for writing more emulators.
- Dennis Toeppen
... for always being a friend and for hosting all of my website junk.
- Paul Heller
Paul, like me, used the Wang 2200 way back, and was interested in helping advance the emulator. He added emulation for the printer device and also got the emulator ported to the Apple OS X platform, and made many other contributions.
- Mike Bahia
Mike is one of the last soldiers standing in the 2200 unit of Getronics, formerly Wang. Rather than dumping a lot of manuals and equipment when storage space was in short supply, Mike found this web site and generously sent many manuals, a couple 2436 type terminals, a CPU cage and three different MVP CPU boards, a few other I/O boards, some old tapes and disks.
- Jay West
Jay is the host/moderator/voice of reason on the classic computer mailing list. Being a supporter of all machines classic, he very generously hosted this web site for a number of years.
- Brian McGuire
Brian sent me some manuals that I didn't have, and which are now up on the docs page.
- Jay Butterman
... for the Wang disks that I soon hope to capture and present on this web site in one form or another.
- Mark Pickersgill
Mark supplied all the information on this website about Fasstcom, including pictures. I had never heard of them before, and there is precious little about Fasstcom on the web.
- Tim Lahey
Tim found an old "System 2200 Summary" cheat sheet, and was kind enough to send it along so that everyone who visits can enjoy it.
- Chris Cummings
Chris has been an important member of the Wang 2200 community since forever. He had both the foresight to retain most of his old Wang manuals and datasheets, but also the fortitude to scan it all. His work appears on the documents page.
- Andy Wardley
Andy is responsible for creating and maintaining the Template Toolkit. This is a nice open source templating system that makes creating and maintaining the web pages of this site a lot simpler.
- Paul Szudzik
Paul contributed all the Southern Data System (SDS) docs that appear on the site. Paul reverse engineered many Wang hardware and software protocols in order to develop new products for the 2200 add-on market. One of these documents was a tremendous help in getting version 2.1 of the Wang 2200 emulator done.
- Ron O'Kelly
Ron donated a box of Wang manuals, datasheets, and boot disks. Many of them weren't on the website yet, but they are now!
- John (Kirit) Baxi
John forwarded a copy of an unreleased Wang product, a BASIC-2 interpreter for the Wang PC. John has also shared some stories and I hope to pick his brain for more information to put up on the website.
- William Payne
William Payne wrote the book, Implementing BASICs: How BASICs Work, and was kind enough to allow me to scan it and put it online.
- Russell Page
Russell picked up the William Payne book, Implementing BASICs: How BASICs Work, and was astute enough to realize the dialect of BASIC that is the basis of the book is actually Wang 2200 MVP BASIC. He contacted the author and got his approval to scan the book and make it available online.
- David Schmidt
Although Wang OIS stuff is outside the normal range of interests of this website, there really is very little documentation for it on the web, unfortunately. David worked out the Wang OIS floppy disk format, which is on the links page.
- Theo Laan
Theo used a catweasel utility written for Wang 2200 formatted disks and successfully captured the contents of his Wang OIS word processing boot disks.
- Lex Cunningham
Lex is working on restoring a Wang 2200A back to operation. His unit contains the 6317 keyboard controller board, and it wasn't working. Because this site didn't have the schematic for it, Lex traced out all the signals and produced a schematic for it.
- Leon Felkins
Leon generously donated a Wang 2200 MVP system and a few manuals. While the system didn't work at first, I was able to clean it up and swap some cards and got it running again. However, I still lack a disk system, so that will be a future project.
- B&D Fules Incorporated
B&D Fules was a fake company created by high school friends Peter Blum, Alan Burkle, and Jonathan Hughey. They managed to keep a dozen floppy disks for nearly 40 years. The floppies were still readable after all that time. They distilled the contents down to a "best of" floppy disk.