An Wang: The Forgotten Computer Billionaire Who Fired His Own Son

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In 1984, Dr. An Wang was the fifth richest person in America, worth about $1.6 billion and employing 30,000 people. Born in Shanghai in 1920, he immigrated to the United States in June 1945, finished a Harvard doctorate in applied physics by 1948, and went to work with Howard Aiken. There he co-invented the pulse transfer controlling device, which solved the destructive readout problem and made magnetic core memory practical for continuous computing.

This episode traces how Wang turned that invention into Wang Laboratories, founded in 1951 as a sole proprietorship after Harvard cut back its computer research. He sold his core memory patent to IBM for a flat $500,000, cornered the desktop calculator market, then pivoted into word processing and minicomputers. At the peak of his power he insisted on handing the company to his son Fred, a decision that collided with the rise of the personal computer and ended in a public and painful removal.

• Early computer memory erased data in the act of reading it. Wang's device rewrote the data immediately afterward, a mechanism engineers call write after read.
• To raise $50,000 in working capital, Wang gave up a third of his young company to the Warner and Swasey Company, a machine tools manufacturer.
• His 1976 multi-user word processing system put a Zilog Z80 processor and disk storage in a central master unit, with coaxial cables running to diskless terminals.
• The Wang VS minicomputer mimicked the instruction set of the IBM System 370, making it easy for IBM-trained programmers to adapt their software.
• Fred Wang became CEO in 1986 and was removed by his father in 1989. An Wang died of cancer on March 24th, 1990, at age 70, leaving his name on a Boston theater and a Massachusetts General Hospital building.