Just a note for new readers: Norm used this to launch the IRL version of Cooper’s Blog, but it got cancelled because of time constraints and Norm lost the posted material. He couldn’t save an archived version unfortunately.
Back in the 1980s, the Wang OIS was *the* word processor. The source code for the .v2 software was contained at Wang headquarters on a tower of 300 MB disk packs, which – tragically – somehow tumbled to the ground. It was extraordinarily tight code, written in Assembly language, and designed to run on a 32K workstation (although later terminals had a massive 64K.) No backups were available. Thus when the company came out with WP+, it was slow and cumbersome compared to the original because it was nothing more than an emulation written in much less optimized code. A bit of ancient DP history, simply because sometimes data gets lost despite our best intentions.
When I was stationed aboard the USS CARL VINSON, homeported in Alameda, California, Wang, Inc. had provided the ship a great service. It incluced Wang word processing workstations for all the divisions on the ship. It was called a word processor, but it did so much more than WP. That’s one of the reasons it was “the word processor” in the 1980s.
Just a note for new readers: Norm used this to launch the IRL version of Cooper’s Blog, but it got cancelled because of time constraints and Norm lost the posted material. He couldn’t save an archived version unfortunately.
NotAlwaysRight is basically the same thing.
Back in the 1980s, the Wang OIS was *the* word processor. The source code for the .v2 software was contained at Wang headquarters on a tower of 300 MB disk packs, which – tragically – somehow tumbled to the ground. It was extraordinarily tight code, written in Assembly language, and designed to run on a 32K workstation (although later terminals had a massive 64K.) No backups were available. Thus when the company came out with WP+, it was slow and cumbersome compared to the original because it was nothing more than an emulation written in much less optimized code. A bit of ancient DP history, simply because sometimes data gets lost despite our best intentions.
When I was stationed aboard the USS CARL VINSON, homeported in Alameda, California, Wang, Inc. had provided the ship a great service. It incluced Wang word processing workstations for all the divisions on the ship. It was called a word processor, but it did so much more than WP. That’s one of the reasons it was “the word processor” in the 1980s.