Thanks

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, or the time I dropped a hot soldering iron on the new Persian rug... and didn't notice for five minutes. Oops.

  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 a Wang or three.

• 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 the encouragement, and for supplying a scan of the crucial Wang Service Manual for the 2200. Without it, writing an emulator would have taken a LOT longer and would have been much less fun. The scan came from a copy of the manual that was supplied by Jan van de Veen.

• 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 fanstastic 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 offered to host this web site.

• 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.