Old Calculator Museum Advertising & Documentation Archive
Wang Laboratories 380 Programmer
Wang Laboratories 380 Programmer Console Advertisement Electronics Magazine, November, 1968
The Wang 380 is a keyboard/display unit that operates with most
Wang Laboratories 300-Series
calculator electronics packages. It provided programming capability
significantly beyond that of the add-on
Wang CP-1.
punched card reader
The 380 was introduced in March of 1968, as an attempt by Wang Laboratories
to wring some additional lifetime out of their 300-series electronic calculators,
which by this time were becoming rather dated.
With Hewlett Packard's March, '68 announcement of the famous HP 9100A
electronic calculator,
Wang's 300-series calculators were no comparison, especially when it came
to programmability. The Wang 370 and Wang 380 Programmer consoles
were stop-gap measures to help sustain the 300-series sales while Wang
Laboratories embarked on a crash effort to develop a new calculator to
compete head-to-head with HP's 9100A and
9100B calculators.
The result of Wang Labs' efforts was the
Wang 700-Series
calculators, which in time proved to be a worthy adversary for HP's 9100-Series
calculators, but by the time the 700-Series arrived on the market, HP had
already introduced its 9800-Series calculators, certainly stealing some
sales from Wang's 700-Series.
The Wang 380 Programmer Console stored the keyboard-entered
program steps onto a magnetic tape cartridge, very similar to an old
8-Track music cartridge, with an endless loop of magnetic tape inside.
Varying lengths of tape cartridge were available from Wang Laboratories
for varying-sizes of programs. The program step capacity of the 380
was limited only by the length of the tape in the cartridge.
The 380 provided much of the same programming capabilities of the punched
card-based
Wang 370
programmer, but was not limited by the number of steps that can be punched
on a punched card. The downside to the 380 as compared to the 370 is that
the 380 is considerably slower than the 370, as when executing programs, it must
read each step off the tape one at a time. When branches occur, the tape must
be searched to find the destination of the branch, which can take considerable
time. This makes any program that does a lot of decision-making or
iterative operations execute slowly as compared to the 370, and much more
slowly than the Hewlett Packard calculators, which stored user programs
in very fast magnetic core memory. The tape is moved in only
one direction, so if a branch points to a step that is located on the
tape before the current instruction, the tape must be advanced all the
way to the end and back to the referenced instruction (remember, the tape
is a loop).
Like the 370, the 380 could be connected to a wide
range of peripherals including extended memory registers, a Teletype interface,
Output Writer (Modified IBM Selectric Typewriter), I/O Writer(Modified IBM
Selectric Typewriter), Cassette Tape Drive, and numerous other interfaces.
The 380 is similar inside to a regular Wang 300-series keyboard/display
unit, using the same type of Nixie tube display, and similar keyboard
technology but with many more keys for the programming operations.
The cabinet is larger in all dimensions than any of the non-programmable
keyboard/display units, with most notably a taller profile to house the
small card-cage containing the logic that provides the programming
functionality and interfaces the magnetic tape cartridge
drive. As with the 300-series calculators, the circuitry uses discrete
transistor technology.
The Old Calculator Museum currently has an operational Wang 380 Programmer,
and work is in progress to document it in an exhibit in the online museum
website.