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Ha. My dad was VP engineering at Vydec for a while. I worked there for a summer, and used the Vydec to write a Pascal course (which I taught there). It had a gr

by markc 6y ago

Ha. My dad was VP engineering at Vydec for a while. I worked there for a summer, and used the Vydec to write a Pascal course (which I taught there). It had a great vector display, nice keyboard. It had 8” floppy disks. I think they were selling for $10k. I remember seeing my first sealed 20Mb “Winchester” hard drive there, which would be incorporated soon. Nicely designed, advanced word processors for their time. Dad told me about the time he met with Francis Ford Coppola who wanted to buy a bunch for Apocalypse Now. Exxon Information Systems bought them around then, and there was a management bloodbath. My dad initially got more responsibility as his bosses got the axe, but he saw the writing on the wall and left for DEC. Wang soon destroyed them in the market.

reaperducer 6y ago
Wang soon destroyed them in the market "Wang" sets off a lot of old memories for me. A Wang was the first proper terminal I ever used. It was at a chemical company, and interfaced to a minicomputer that contained all of the safety information for the chemicals the company produced. One of my responsibilities was printing labels for one-off sample drums of chemicals that went out to potential customers. I'd use the Wang to key in the information about what was in the drum, and the minicomputer drove this incredible laser printer. It was about the size of a pizza oven, and could print the drum labels so fast that they were actually tractor feed. It's the only tractor feed laser printer I've ever seen. The label stock was awesome. Big, long stickers about the size of a flat-screen TV with hazardous materials symbols on one end. I also used the Wang to update the various Material Safety Data Sheets binders that were distributed around the campus. But that was much less fun.
rbanffy 6y ago
Is your dad still around? I'm part of the team that is adding some symbols to Unicode to represent data from legacy computers and there is one symbol on Videc's OCR-A table that doesn't appear in the OCR-A standard (or, if it does, we couldn't find it). We couldn't identify the symbol associated with "]" in the "OCR-A 10 (cont)" table (from https://archive.org/details/Vydec-1200-1400-1800-Systems-BasicTextEditing-ReferenceManual/page/n103/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Vydec-1200-1400-1800-Systems-Bas...).

by markc 6y ago

reaperducer 6y ago

Wang soon destroyed them in the market "Wang" sets off a lot of old memories for me. A Wang was the first proper terminal I ever used. It was at a chemical company, and interfaced to a minicomputer that contained all of the safety information for the chemicals the company produced. One of my responsibilities was printing labels for one-off sample drums of chemicals that went out to potential customers. I'd use the Wang to key in the information about what was in the drum, and the minicomputer drove this incredible laser printer. It was about the size of a pizza oven, and could print the drum labels so fast that they were actually tractor feed. It's the only tractor feed laser printer I've ever seen. The label stock was awesome. Big, long stickers about the size of a flat-screen TV with hazardous materials symbols on one end. I also used the Wang to update the various Material Safety Data Sheets binders that were distributed around the campus. But that was much less fun.

rbanffy 6y ago

Is your dad still around? I'm part of the team that is adding some symbols to Unicode to represent data from legacy computers and there is one symbol on Videc's OCR-A table that doesn't appear in the OCR-A standard (or, if it does, we couldn't find it). We couldn't identify the symbol associated with "]" in the "OCR-A 10 (cont)" table (from https://archive.org/details/Vydec-1200-1400-1800-Systems-BasicTextEditing-ReferenceManual/page/n103/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Vydec-1200-1400-1800-Systems-Bas...).