WANG, An

(b. 7 February 1920 in Shanghai, China; d. 24 March 1990 in Boston, Massachusetts), inventor of the first efficient computer memory and founder of Wang Laboratories, manufacturer of the first electronic calculators and word processors.

Wang was one of five children born to Yin-lu Wang and Z.-W. Chien. Because Wang was the eldest son (of four siblings), Wang's father, an English teacher, pushed the boy to excel academically. At Shanghai Provincial High School and, later, at Chiao Tung University, from which he graduated in 1940 with a bachelor's degree in science, most of his textbooks were in English, and his mathematics curricula were modeled directly on those of American colleges. The Japanese invasion of China threatened his dreams of becoming an electrical engineer, and Wang fled to central China to join those fighting against the Japanese. By 1945 his work in building radio equipment earned him entry into an American program designed to train Chinese engineers in the United States and then return them to their homeland after the war.

Living on a meager stipend of $100 a month, Wang studied briefly at Georgetown University and then at Harvard, where he earned an M.S. in applied physics in 1946. By then the fellowship program had collapsed, but Wang earned a Benrus Time Fellowship, enabling him to gain a Ph.D. in applied physics and engineering in 1948. After graduation Wang worked at the Harvard Computation Laboratory under Howard Aiken, designer of America's computer. There Wang designed a series of toroid-shaped magnetized nickel-iron (later ferrite) coils, which provided a new way to store information. These memory units, or Pulse Transfer Controlling Devices, as they were called in Wang's 1949 patent application, would serve as the dominant form of computer memory storage for the next two decades. In 1949 Wang married Lorraine Chiu; they had three children. In 1951 he founded Wang Laboratories.

IBM's purchase of Wang's patent rights, in 1955, was a classic win-win situation: Wang used the capital from the deal to start designing and building his own line of digital electronic products, and IBM, using the densely packed memory-storage unit in its 360 series computers, which contained 250,000 ferrite cores, was able to dominate the mainframe computer market throughout the 1960s. Combined, Wang's electronic calculators and IBM's computers—both introduced in 1964—made Wang famous. Wang Laboratories's early products were successful but only within severely limited market niches. Several dozen transistorized logic boards for scientific work, seventy or eighty digital controllers for machine tools, and about twenty phototypesetting machines might be sold per year. Certainly this was impressive—in 1964 the company's gross income reached a million dollars—but it was only the beginning. The true breakthrough came with the electronic calculator.

Wang's early calculators, the LOCI and the WANG 300, were hardly hand-held. The LOCI took up most of a desktop and used a teletype keyboard; it sold for $6,700. The WANG 300, a "breakthrough" model, employed some three hundred transistors and featured a numerical keypad and a small desktop display. It sold for $1,700; by 1971 its price had dropped to $600. The success of Wang's calculators was made possible by the use of what we now call software. To multiply or divide two numbers, the calculator read the logarithm of each number, added or subtracted as needed, and converted the result back to a natural number. However, all operations of Wang's early machines had to be hardwired; even when the later WANG 360 calculated trigonometric functions, the operation employed a software-like sequence of existing hardwired functions. The WANG 380, introduced in 1968, was the first programmable calculator, which for $3,800 offered a choice of magnetic tape or punched card input and output; all it lacked to be considered one of the first personal computers was a usable memory. That breakthrough had to wait for the development of semiconductor-based memory systems, which was introduced to the market in 1971.

Perhaps Wang's greatest inspiration was his recognition that these new integrated circuits would spell the end of the electronic calculator as a profit source; he aggressively shifted Wang Lab's resources into the development of minicomputers and word-processing systems. The first Wang computers, the model 4000 and the model 3300 BASIC, designed to take advantage of the first programming language to use all-English instructions, were introduced in 1968. The next year, Wang began shipping the model 700, a programmable calculator that could be, and was, used as a computer; it was the last Wang product to use the ferrite-core memory system on which the company's fortunes had been founded. The same electronics powered the model 1200 word processor, introduced in 1971. By 1978 the company became the largest North American supplier of computers for small businesses.

In 1964 Wang Laboratories moved from rented space to a new headquarters complex in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, on Route 128—the 1960s version of Silicon Valley. That year, Wang Laboratories sold just twenty LOCI calculators; the next year they sold 120; and in 1966, when they introduced the model 300, Wang sold 340 in just six months. Sales quickly rose from $1 million in 1964 to $2.5 million in 1965 and to $6.9 million in 1967; by 1970 the company recorded $25 million in sales. In these three years, Wang Labs grew from thirty-five employees to four hundred; at its height, in the 1980s, it would have thirty thousand. Wang's rise was capped in 1967, when Wang Labs went public. Initially priced at $12.50 per share, the stock ended its first day at $40.50. Wang, who had retained 64 percent of the stock, ended the day worth nearly $50 million.

Wang's last years were darkened by struggles to preserve his company and his life. He succumbed to cancer of the esophagus in 1990 and was buried in Lincoln, Massachusetts. His company, which could not withstand a nationwide recession, filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy a year later. He was mourned throughout Boston, his adopted city, to whose institutions he had given generously over the years. The Wang Center for the Performing Arts and the Wang outpatient care unit of Massachusetts General Hospital are but two visible signs of that support.

Wang exemplified the American dream. Arriving in the United States a nearly penniless immigrant in June 1945, he won a series of scholarships and academic appointments. By 1951 he was able to found his own company, Wang Laboratories. Four years later he assigned one of his patents to IBM for $500,000; and at his company's height, in the 1980s, Wang Labs had a gross income of more than $2.5 billion. Throughout, the modest Dr. Wang continually asserted, "Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius."

Wang's autobiography, Lessons: An Autobiography (1986), was written with Eugene Linden. For information about Wang's contributions to computer development, see Eric A. Weiss, "Eloge: An Wang, 1920–1990," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 15, no. 1 (1993): 60–69. An obituary is in the New York Times (25 Mar. 1990).

Hartley S. Spatt