Wang 600-14TP #CC7681

This Wang 600 is probably one of the last small-scale integration calculators to be produced outside the Soviet bloc and is the final iteration of an electronic architecture, microcode structure and form factor that was developed for the Wang 700, ten years earlier.

The machine is fully-featured with printer, tape drive and maximum RAM of 4k. Its internal date codes are from late 1977, when Wang was leaving the calculator business and transforming into a word processing and minicomputer company. Wang’s past dominance of the calculator business must have left a fat tail of customers heavily invested in the quirks and specificites of Wang calculators, which in turn must have maintained a demand for machines that were otherwise outdated.

There are a few concessions to 1970s progress:

• second-generation semiconductor RAM using Intel 2102 1kx1 static RAM chips,
• microcode ROM using Signetics 2580 2kx4 mask ROMs,
• revised Panaplex display panel
• and most surprisingly a revised keyboard with more conventional long-travel keys rather than the short, clicky keys that Wang had used on every keyboard since the original LOCI of 1963.

The first three changes are understandable as cost/function improvements with improved technology, or responses to obsolescence. The keyboard change is harder to understand as it seems unlikely that parts for the prevailing keyboard design became unobtainable, and there must have been an engineering cost to the change with no obvious reduction in parts or assembly cost. It seems very late for Wang to have decided that keyboard ‘feel’ was indeed a selling point.

It’s hard to see this machine as other than a living relic when comparing it to Hewlett-Packard’s 1976 offerings: the HP-97 which packed the capability of the Wang 600 (and more) into a book-sized desktop package, or the HP-67 which had the same capability in a pocket-sized package. Nevertheless, these giant Wang desktops did seem to live on. This 600-14TP machine was known to have been in use in the drilling industry until 1985 and DoPECC’s 600-6TP has Bendix asset tags from 1987. Perhaps these machines lived on due to their integration into established processes. The 600-14TP was said to have been part of a simulator for training drill operators and the external interface facility of the Wang machines may have been sufficiently unique to make them difficult to replace.