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 Today is the birthday of An Wang, the Chinese-American engineer and inventor who founded Wang Laboratories, a Massachusetts-based company that created calculators and computers, employing 30,000 people and achieving $3 billion in annual sales. "I founded Wang Laboratories," he is reputed to have said, "to show that Chinese could excel at things other than running laundries and restaurants".
An Wang was born on February 7, 1920 in Shanghai, China, a bustling commercial center and one of the world's most populous cities. During the late 1930s, he attended Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), a technical school that was nicknamed the "Eastern MIT". Wang earned a degree in electrical engineering in 1940, but faced an uncertain future. Tragically, most of his family died during the Japanese occupation that began with the Battle of Shanghai in 1937. In June 1945, An Wang immigrated to the United States and enrolled at Harvard University. He earned a Ph.D. in applied physics in 1948, but continued to work with Harvard's Howard Aiken on the design of the Mark IV, a fully-electronic computer.
Dr. Wang's first invention, a pulse transfer controlling device, was an early type of magnetic core memory which used a donut-shaped ferrite ring that was magnetized in only two directions: 0 and 1. Because Harvard was not interesting in pursuing patents for commercial products, Wang filed his own application with the U.S. Patent Office (USPO) in 1949. Two years later, he left the underfunded Harvard Computation Laboratory to start his own company, Wang Laboratories. Although Wang's initial investment was only $600, his sale of patent 2,708,722 to IBM for $500,000 provided additional capital. During the 1960s, Dr. Wang introduced the Wang 300, an electronic calculator based on LOCI, an earlier Wang scientific calculator that supported multiple keyboards and printed results via teletype. By using LOCI's efficient computational algorithms, Wang minimized the use of then-expensive multiplier circuits in the Wang 300. The substitution of a numerical keyboard for a teletype machine also cut costs.
By the end of the 1960s, Wang Laboratories dominated the marketplace for desktop calculators; however, the advent of the integrated circuits (IC) reduced profit margins and led to renewed competition with rivals such as Hewlett-Packard. During the 1970s, An Wang retooled his business, explaining that "markets change, tastes change, so the companies and individuals who choose to compete in those markets must change." First, he designed word processors such as the Wang 2200, a desktop computer with a large cathode ray tube (CRT) display. He also built minicomputers such as the Wang VS, a multi-user mainframe that was designed to compete with the IBM S/370. Although Wang workstations looked like other computer terminals, they contained their own microprocessors and random access memory (RAM). Networked systems allowed file sharing, but the Wang operating system (OS) and remained a trade secret.
By the 1980s, Wang Laboratories employed 30,000 people and achieved sales of $3 billion per year. The three Wang towers in Lowell, Massachusetts cost $60 million to build and spanned over a million square-feet of office space. Dr. Wang's philanthropy enriched the arts and sciences, especially in Boston, where the Wang Theatre and the Wang Center for the Performing Arts still bear his name. Before his retirement in 1982, Dr. Wang insisted that the board of directors transfer control of the company to his son, Fred, a 36 year old business school graduate. Today, business historians still debate whether Fred Wang's managerial failures or the development of the personal computer (PC) caused the decline of Wang Laboratories.
An Wang died on March 24, 1990.
Wang Laboratories filed for bankruptcy protection on August 18, 1992.
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Wang
http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/wang.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Jiao_Tong_University
http://www.xnumber.com/xnumber/anwang.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shanghai
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/markets_change-tastes_change-so_the_companies_and/322474.html
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