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Large amount of Wang Computer APC disks acquired.

LiqMatrix

LiqMatrix

Veteran Member
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Nov 2, 2017
Messages
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Would anyone like me to image these? I acquired these through a Craigslist listing from a very nice gentleman. There are 25 Wang 5¼" 360K diskettes for the Wang APC. All of them are in mint condition. He also included two cleaning disks. One for an 8" floppy disk drive and one for a 5¼" floppy disk drive. It looks like they are all the system and diag software plus two versions of Wang's word processor software.

Wang Disks.jpg
 
Please do image those! I'm not aware of much Wang software archived out there. The Wang APC was yet another not entirely IBM compatible machine, so much of the software would be specific to it.
 
I also have a huge collection of Wang Professional Computer / APC disks. I haven't finished archiving them yet.
Also Wang VS and Wang PC (the 286+ PC clones).

I'd also be keen to see them imaged, in case I'm missing something or my disks have bad sectors.
 
I am working with modem7 here at vcfed getting all my docs and disks from a massive new old stock Pentium Pro haul I purchased recently over to minuszerodegrees. I have imaged all the disks successfully and am now in the process of scanning the floppy disks in 24-bit color 300dpi resolution. Once that is done I will submit it to modem7 and they should be up quickly after that on -0°. Cheers.

P.S. - I did verify all the 360K disk images in WinImage and they all look good, but it seems Wang software is not compatible with DOSBox as when you go to run any of the software DOSBox just hangs. I tried multiple .conf file configs. So it seems you need real Wang APC hardware to run these, but maybe one of you will have better luck. I put all this info in a text file with the image archive.

I am just tickled to death these disks were in perfect physical condition and not one error from any of the disks during the imaging process.
 
SpidersWeb said:
I also have a huge collection of Wang Professional Computer / APC disks. I haven't finished archiving them yet.
Also Wang VS and Wang PC (the 286+ PC clones).

I'd also be keen to see them imaged, in case I'm missing something or my disks have bad sectors.
Click to expand...

I PM'd you. Once I am done imaging these disks I would be glad to send them your way via media mail if you are in the states. I have no interest in collecting, just preservation.
 
Finally got done with all the diskette scans and packaged it up in a zip file. Modem7 has access to it and it should be up, hopefully soon, over at minuszerodegrees shortly. I'll post a link here when it is available.
 
Interesting. I am pretty sure now it looks like the Wang APC had its own way of doing things. Seems you have to have the hardware to use the software as it wont work, in my testing, with vanilla MS-DOS. Since none of the software would work in DOSBox I went ahead and tried it on an old MS-DOS 6.22 machine of mine and sure enough if I try to execute any of the .exe files with any of the Wang floppy disks it hard locks my machine. Maybe you guys who are more technical than I know the reasons. Maybe a special hardware call the software does, etc.??? One thing is for sure, Wang is doing it their way.

Also, another interesting note. The three Wang diagnostic disks don't have executable files on them (well, one on disk 2). Is anyone familiar with Wang APC hardware? It seems to me the system must call for the disks if you run a program from ROM on the system itself? Seems like the only logical reason to me anyway.
 
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The hardware is set out slightly different to what normal MS DOS expects. You wont be able to boot via emulator unless someone has made an emulator for that specific system.

What's interesting about the Wang is those boot disks load a BIOS then boot a special version of MS DOS. I have 2.1 and 3.3.
One of mine has Word Perfect, Lotus 123 etc on it, but I'm not sure if they're custom versions or heavily reliant on compatibility tweaks.

The Wang Professional or APC's are pretty epic machines, fully 16bit, and almost no jumpers in sight. On mine I have one jumper to change hard drive types, and one switch bank to set the serial port speed. I can add or remove RAM without worrying about any settings or jumpers at all. All cards are the same size and mounted nicely, floppy drives have separate connectors per drive, build in BIOS allows you to boot from any device, even the keyboard where you can type in assembler. You can also use the printer or serial port as a screen device (ruined by MS DOS though, which directly pokes the video card).

It's like the IBM PC where cost wasn't a consideration - BUT expensive and heavy and no real aftermarket options I've seen.

If anyone has ideas on how I could backup my hard drive system (e.g. software that 100% uses MS DOS calls, not hardware, to do serial, parallel, or take a giant raw image and split over multiple disks?) I'd be keen to hear. I need to get around to that.


Edit: Link to my post when I found mine, I haven't finished archiving, but if anyone needs something specific - yell out: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthre...oftware-(new-arrival)&highlight=wang+vm+disks
 
SpidersWeb said:
The hardware is set out slightly different to what normal MS DOS expects. You wont be able to boot via emulator unless someone has made an emulator for that specific system.

What's interesting about the Wang is those boot disks load a BIOS then boot a special version of MS DOS. I have 2.1 and 3.3.
One of mine has Word Perfect, Lotus 123 etc on it, but I'm not sure if they're custom versions or heavily reliant on compatibility tweaks.

The Wang Professional or APC's are pretty epic machines, fully 16bit, and almost no jumpers in sight. On mine I have one jumper to change hard drive types, and one switch bank to set the serial port speed. I can add or remove RAM without worrying about any settings or jumpers at all. All cards are the same size and mounted nicely, floppy drives have separate connectors per drive, build in BIOS allows you to boot from any device, even the keyboard where you can type in assembler. You can also use the printer or serial port as a screen device (ruined by MS DOS though, which directly pokes the video card).

It's like the IBM PC where cost wasn't a consideration - BUT expensive and heavy and no real aftermarket options I've seen.

If anyone has ideas on how I could backup my hard drive system (e.g. software that 100% uses MS DOS calls, not hardware, to do serial, parallel, or take a giant raw image and split over multiple disks?) I'd be keen to hear. I need to get around to that.


Edit: Link to my post when I found mine, I haven't finished archiving, but if anyone needs something specific - yell out: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthre...oftware-(new-arrival)&highlight=wang+vm+disks
Click to expand...

Outstanding and thanks for explaining the Wang way. Haha... Feel free to download and combine my 20 disk archive to yours so you can make a larger and more definitive archive for the Wang systems. It would be a fantastic contribution to the vintage hardware community. I'll send those disks out to you and you will be happy to know the disks were all in factory new condition as the owner never used them much and just stored them away. Unfortunately, though, they scrapped the actual Wang APC system years ago which is always a sad note, but at least we have the disks archived.
 
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The Wang Professional or APC's are pretty epic machines, fully 16bit, and almost no jumpers in sight. On mine I have one jumper to change hard drive types, and one switch bank to set the serial port speed. I can add or remove RAM without worrying about any settings or jumpers at all. All cards are the same size and mounted nicely, floppy drives have separate connectors per drive, build in BIOS allows you to boot from any device, even the keyboard where you can type in assembler. You can also use the printer or serial port as a screen device (ruined by MS DOS though, which directly pokes the video card).

It's like the IBM PC where cost wasn't a consideration - BUT expensive and heavy and no real aftermarket options I've seen.
Click to expand...

I worked on the original Wang Professional Computer back at Wang in 1981/1982. We never tried to be IBM compatible. We had a true 16-bit processor and memory path, and the processor was 8MHz versus IBM's 4.77MHz. I also asked my hardware engineer if we could detect the option boards without guessing (port probing), and he responded with the ID register each board had so we knew exactly what was in each slot. We should have patented that! We also supported up to 896K of memory for MS-DOS applications (not 640K like PC-DOS).

By the way, many of the "hardware specific" behavior you attribute to MS-DOS (PC-DOS) were actually the result of IBM's BIOS (both the ROM BIOS and the PC-DOS BIOS) and apps. While I was working for Wang, we asked Microsoft to discourage PC vendors from creating apps that interacted with the hardware directly (no writing directly to screen memory or touching the I/O ports). Their first attempt was ANSI.SYS, but no one really liked it and it pretty much died.

What's interesting about the Wang is those boot disks load a BIOS then boot a special version of MS DOS. I have 2.1 and 3.3.
Click to expand...

Actually, the "special version of MS DOS" is really the generic version of MS-DOS, not the IBM specific version of MS-DOS. I wrote the BIOS (the one that loads off the disk) to support those versions of MS-DOS. Those were the days...

I'd love to see the archive you mentioned SpidersWeb, but the link doesn't seem to work. I have a Wang PC I'd like to get working once I build a Wang keyboard emulator (and then find a way to view the video output).

P.S. There were ultimately several aftermarket devices available from several companies like Magna Computer Corporation and EMC, but the original Wang PC pretty much died when Wang decided to start marking clones instead. :eek:(
 
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