Wang Laboratories was founded in 1951 by Dr. An Wang. After IBM paid Wang $500,000 for his core memory patent in 1955, Wang incorporated Wang Laboratories with Dr Ge-Yao Chu.
The company was successively headquartered in Cambridge (1954–1963), Tewksbury (1963–1976) and Lowell, Massachusetts (1976–1997). At its peak in the 1980s, it had revenues of $3 billion/year and employed over 40,000 people.
During the 1960s the company became a pioneer in the manufacture of desktop electronic calculators. In the late 1960s the company moved its focus from calculators to word processing machines. In 1972 Wang Laboratories began producing the Wang 1200, its first word processor. The company also began developing minicomputers in the early 1970s. The Wang 2200, released in 1973, was one of the first desktop computers with a large CRT display and ran a fast hardwired BASIC interpreter.
The company was always directed by Dr. Wang, who played a personal role in setting business strategy and product strategy and thus must be credited both with the company's successes and failures.
Dr. Wang took steps to ensure that the Wang family would retain control of the company even after going public. He created a second class of stock, class B, with higher dividends but only one-tenth the voting power of class C. The public mostly bought class B shares; the Wang family retained most of the class C shares. (The letters B and C were used to ensure that brokerages would fill any Wang stock orders with class B shares unless class C was specifically requested). Wang stock had been listed in the New York Stock Exchange, but this manoeuvre was not quite acceptable under NYSE's rules, and Wang was forced to delist with NYSE and relist on the more liberal American Stock Exchange. Under his direction, the company went through several distinct transitions between different product lines.
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