Why get a typewriter when you can get a Wang?

Posted by Current_Yellow7722@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 19 comments

Think a case can be made that when it comes to the hard copy, typewriters generally print better text, at the time.

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JKPig66@reddit

Administered and programmed COBOL on a Wang VS 7310 in the 90s. Easiest OS I've ever worked with.

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tes_kitty@reddit

Depends on what kind of printer that was. With a daisy wheel printer you get the same quality as a typewriter.

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Yeah, for people who haven't seen daisywheel prints with a carbon (not cloth) ribbon, they are startlingly good. Better than laser printer quality, even, although the kind of printing you can do is very limited. Because the characters are stamped into the paper they're exceptionally crisp-edged.

THEY ARE ALSO EXCEPTIONALLY LOUD.

(I have a very old, very bad video demonstrating one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA5Xrko_aMY)

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tes_kitty@reddit

... and pretty slow.

So you get very good print quality, but you pay for it.

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leoc@reddit

They left you stuck with a limited character set, too (though you might be able to swap heads to change the available characters and markings). OTOH the noise wouldn’t have seemed so bad in an age when people were used to offices full of the sound of typewriters and old telephones with loud ringers.

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tes_kitty@reddit

Yes, a daisy wheel had in the range of 96 characters. So not even enough for 7Bit ASCII without changing the wheel

Also, you couldn't print bitmap graphics.

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LittlePooky@reddit

I had a brother typewriter-and I bought the interface for it (a white box) that I was able to attached it to LPT interface to my Compaq Portable. Took a day to get WordStar to work with it fully (bold, underline). Worked very well. And got cloth ribbon for it-I missed that old thing!!!!!!!!!!!!

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kodabarz@reddit

It was indeed a daisy wheel printer with the WOA - the PM-015

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Current_Yellow7722@reddit (OP)

This is true.

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hates_writing_checks@reddit

Spreadsheets?

That's Number-Wang!

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Hjalfi@reddit

Obligatory link to Freezepop's Do you like my Wang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXtpSilZTxE

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Caesar457@reddit

I think I need this. People have gotten so dumb at using computers they need to go back to the more analog days

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Snocom79@reddit

A small, religious, private school I attended for a couple of years had a bunch of these to teach us computer skills. We played mancala and some text based adventure games. They had the cup modem hookups but we had no way of knowing what to dial into or if any of that would have worked. This was around 92-93.

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leoc@reddit

Wang and, even more, Datapoint are incredibly neglected companies, probably partly because they mess up neat DAWN OF THE MICRO timelines. In 1973 you could have a remarkably 1977-like experience on a Wang 2200: boot to BASIC, load games from cassette, play them on a CRT screen with a real keyboard. It's just that you (or more likely, your employer) had to pay $7,400 to have it.

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