(Fwd) Re: Wang PC XC3-2

From: Sam Ismail <dastar_at_wco.com>
Date: Mon May 4 01:59:21 1998

On Sat, 2 May 1998, Lawrence Walker wrote:

> Most likely quietly fed to dumpsters around the world since most small
> businesses don't have garage sales. You were fortunate ( mind you didn't find
> it in the garbage) to have some means of IO. Mine had the 2 winchesters
> removed and nothing else. I find the MB interesting with its mix of Zilog,
> Motorola and Intel chips. Old Wang was known for it's interesting innovations

My motherboard is probably a later revision (board is stamped with 1985
date code) and only has Intel 8086 CPU.
 
> and IIRC many of it's people went on to illustrious careers with other
> companies , like the original DEC, Xerox, and Atari crews did. I don\t have the
> URL for the WUG handy but it should be readily available thru a search. They're
> a Brit group IIRC and I wasn't about to pay $35 for the privelage of joining
> their discussions. Could you give me some info on the FDD's , KB , etc.

The floppy drive seemed to be a standard half-height double density drive.
The keyboard is interesting. Its definitely not a standard PC keyboard.
First of all it has a 4-conductor DIN plug. Also, upon boot-up it seems
to go through a rigorous self-test. There are 3 LEDs on the keyboard
between the top row number keys and the function keys. They light-up in
patterns at boot-up for several seconds. Pretty cool to watch. Also, the
keyboard has a speaker in it. I didn't pay attention as to whether the
system beeps emanate from it but it does make a pleasant key-click sound
for every key pressed.

The hard drive is a 10 MB NEC (model 134-200403-006). I'm hoping its
auto-parking because I couldn't find any park or shutdown command on the
drive. It has MS-DOS 2.01 loaded. I got additional floppies which are
basically system disks: DOS, diagnostics, etc. My unit also has a
Streamer Interface (a tape drive controller).

The system boots into a nice menu program. From there you can get into
most everything loaded onto the hard drive including Wang BASIC (which is
simply a re-branded GW BASIC). You can also modify the menu system add
your own items.

On an unrelated note, today I picked up a very cool PC disk copying
system. Its a small box, big enough to enclose two half-height 5.25"
drives and a power supply and controller board. The front panel has three
buttons: Start, Reset and AT/XT. I assume the AT/XT button allows you to
select between double density and Quad/High(?) density disks. However,
the button seems to be stuck. Basically you stick the original in the top
drive and the blank in the bottom and hit start. It takes about 90
seconds to do a complete copy. It does a track by track copy, reading the
track from drive A and writing it to drive B. I'm not sure if it will
copy copy-protected diskettes but I don't see any reason why not. It uses
some Intel micro-controller on the controller board but I don't know which
one as all the indentifying numbers have been scratched off for whatever
reason. The rest is TTL logic.

I made a copy of a 360K disk and it worked fine.

Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
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Received on Mon May 04 1998 - 01:59:21 BST

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