To Wang

An Wang ( Chinese  王安 , Pinyin Wáng Ān ; born February 7, 1920 in Shanghai , China , † March 24, 1990 in the USA ) was a computer developer and inventor.

biography

Wang was born in Shanghai, China and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1945 . In the 1950s he worked with Howard Aiken at Harvard University . Wang invented some major computing technologies, including the pulse transfer controlling device , an important part of core memory .

Wang founded Wang Laboratories in 1951 . The company manufactured programmable desktop calculators - forerunners of the later pocket calculators - in the 1960s and word processing computers in the 1970s. The Wang 1200 from 1972 consisted of a modified typewriter. A small computer was housed in it, which could save and display texts. The texts could be edited and printed out (the typewriter would then type by itself). This was followed by real computer systems (Wang 2200, 1973), which faced competition from the emerging home computers towards the end of the 1970s . Although enormously expensive, the wangs were very useful. The author Stephen King had one.

The Wang Laboratories were located in Lowell , Massachusetts and employed in its heyday more than 30,000 employees. In 1981, Wang was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Wang died of cancer in 1990.