“The Doctor,” An Wang -- (See Teaser Question from the last Blog)

Dr. An Wang is generally credited with developing and manufacturing the most popular line of programmable desktop scientific calculators. It was in the mid 1960’s and was followed with a competitive rush into this marketplace by companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments, firms which now dominate the field.

However, Dr. Wang, a subsequently naturalized American citizen who emigrated to the U.S. from Shanghai, China, was an imminently successful inventor, entrepreneur and businessman. He played a major role in the progress of computers when, in 1949, together with his colleague, Way-Dong Woo of Harvard University’s Computation Laboratory, he developed the ferrite core memory.

This was a crucial technological event, because it sped the development of computers. It enabled Jay Forrester of MIT, another famous individual in the early days of computing, to modify Wang’s design and to use it in his work with Whirlwind, the first real-time computer used by the U.S. Air Force in flight simulation.

Although the company founded by Dr. Wang, is now non-existent and largely forgotten in the business world, at its peak Wang Laboratories was a highly profitable, multi-billion dollar revenue producer which employed as many as 30,000 people worldwide.

Dr. Wang was an agile business strategist. Following the advent of solid state components and integrated circuits, he guided the evolution of his product lines away from scientific calculators, to word processors and mini-computers. Under his guidance, Wang Laboratories went on to become the worldwide leader in the word processing marketplace of the 1970’s.