An Wang and Wang Laboratories: Class C Shares, Vaporware and a $525K Tower

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An Wang founded Wang Laboratories in the Boston area in 1951 and built it into a $3 billion technology company. An early loss shaped him: he built the Linasec typesetting computer under contract for Compugraphic, which kept the manufacturing rights and cost him an estimated $1 million. In 1965 he released the LOCI-2 desktop calculator, built from more than 1,200 discrete transistors, and in 1971, at the height of his calculator dominance, he walked away from the business, predicting microchips would turn calculators into commodities. When Wang went public in 1967 at a $77 million valuation, the family kept about 63 percent and created Class B shares with one tenth the voting power for the public and Class C voting shares for the family.

Wang's word processing empire came from Harold Koplow and Dave Moros, two engineers sent to the Long Range Planning department, where people were parked before being fired. They wrote a user manual for a hypothetical machine, which led to the Wang 1200 and the 1977 Office Information System. A grudge over his magnetic core memory patent with IBM drove a 1978 Super Bowl ad casting Wang as David against Goliath. He made his son Fred president, and in October 1983 Fred announced 14 products, many unfinished, a debacle remembered as vaporware. Heavy debt followed, An Wang asked Fred to resign in August 1989, died in March 1990, and the company filed for bankruptcy in August 1992.

• Brokers' systems defaulted to Class B shares, so buyers had to specifically ask for the voting Class C stock.
• Wang moved from the New York Stock Exchange to the American Stock Exchange to keep the dual-class structure.
• The Soviet Union reverse-engineered a Wang minicomputer to build the Iskra 226.
• The Wang Freestyle, a touch-sensitive tablet for annotating files and recording voice memos, cost $12,000.
• The Wang Towers in Lowell, Massachusetts, cost $60 million and housed 4,500 workers, then sold at auction in 1994 for $525,000.