Heh, My father worked for Wang in the UK for a short while, before setting up as an independent software developer and reseller of Wang 2200 systems some time

Heh, My father worked for Wang in the UK for a short while, before setting up as an independent software developer and reseller of Wang 2200 systems some time in the early 70s. As a small boy I played in the washing-machine-sized boxes that they came in, and even played a few Trek and Adventure style games on the machines. I also learned to write on the back of that green-striped fanfold printer paper so I guess I inhaled various program listings in Basic subconsciously! I got kind of tired of "Wang, hur hur" jokes in the playground though. The software my Dad sold was mostly small payroll and similar systems customised for small businesses. To my recollection there was a manufacturer of industrial tubing, an accountancy firm, a members club, a precious metals dealer, and stationers. So these little systems definitely got around. I don't think most of them used the word processing capabilities as the dot-matrix printer output available wouldn't have looked professional enough; I guess there might have been some golf-ball or daisy wheel options, but I don't recall seeing them. Wang did launch a small PC (their "Professional Computer" rather than "Personal Computer") but it was MS-DOS compatible, rather than being an IBM PC clone per se, and I don't think it was very successful - and Wang went bust, so it clearly wasn't enough anyway. I know it ran AutoCAD at least, as I remember demo-ing it to a customer for my Dad. The customer is still around and remembers this, although alas my Dad died a few years back. Once it was clear that the IBM PC compatible was the way of the future, he migrated most of his customers onto a compatible Basic system (Niakwa Basic) rather than completely re-writing the software. As he approached retirement age they either moved on to shrink-wrapped options (probably spreadsheets for some of the simpler ones), or in one or two cases had the systems rewritten in Visual Basic. I tried to help out with that once, but even with a background of writing stuff in Sinclair Basic, the Wang Basic 2C was pretty oddball, and the only documentation for my Dad's stuff was in his head, so I wasn't much use. Anyway, that's a long way of saying that I have a lot of nostalgia for these briefly successful small mini-computers. The PC compatible beat them fair and square, but they were pretty nice machines in their day.