This is the earliest advertisement found thus far outside of Wang Laboratories' own publication,
Programmer. Programmer ran an initial
advertisement in December of
1970 (as usual for Wang Labs, before the calculators were actually available for
sale) for the Wang Laboratories' new 100-Series electronic calculators.
The ad shown here, published in mid-February of 1971, proclaims the Series 100 the
least expensive electronic calculator with logarithmic, statistical, and
trigonometric functions built-in. In fact, these functions were not
included in the base model 100-Series calculators, but were an add-on, provided
by a plug-in Read-Only Memory (ROM) board that has programs in it to
carry out these functions. Whether the 100-series were actually the lowest-priced
calculators, including the price of the option, at the time the machines were
actually available is a debatable claim, with other manufacturers (such as
Computer Design Corporation, a.k.a. Compucorp) offering very capable
scientific/statistical calculators at extremely competitive prices.
The Wang 100-Series calculators proved to be a bit of a second-class
citizen in Wang's lineup of electronic calculators, implemented using
by then outdated diode-based ROM containing the machine's microcode.
At the time, no other calculator on the market used discrete diode-based ROM for
storing microcode, which was an indication that Wang's choice to use
the inexpensive (but space-consuming and power-hungry) discrete discrete diode
ROM technology for the microcode store was likely an unfortunate miscalculation(pun intended).
The 100-Series calculators, which came both in printing and Nixie-tube display versions,
were not heavily marketed, and were technologically outdated at introduction.
Wang Labs sales people and distributorships had a difficult time selling the
machines as the benefits simply did not make them compelling at the price
being asked for them. Despite the relatively backward
technology used in the calculators, there was one high-tech aspect of the
series. The calculators utilized Intel's 1101A 256-bit static Silicon-gate MOS Random
Access Memory chip(introduced in Sept., 1969). The 1101 was Intel's first high-volume
MOS RAM device that put the company on the map as the sole provider of solid-state memory chips to the
memory-hungry computer industry. These chips were used in the 100-Series
to store the calculator's working and memory registers.
Wang Labs had plans to offer an add-on external
learn-mode programmer that never materialized. Instead, a punched
card reader add-on could be attached to the calculator to provide
programmability via steps punched into a pre-scored card, which was a
throwback to Wang Labs' first programmable calculator, the
LOCI-2 introduced in 1965.
The 100-Series calculators were rather expensive to produce, and they
quickly had to have their prices aggressively cut in order to remain
at all competitive. It got to the point where each sale of the
calculators resulted in a net-loss to Wang Labs' bottom line. Advertising for
the 100-Series did not last for long, and its production was halted
in mid-1972 with remaining stock of the machines written off.
The relatively short lifetime of the 100-Series makes the calculators
a relatively uncommon find today.
See the Old Calculator Museum's exhibit on the Wang 144T for an example
of the Nixie-display version of one of the 100-series calculators.
