How to Write a Movie Script in 1981 on a Wangwriter!

We found it y’all, we found the system disk, and it’s glorious! Seriously though, Wang’s word processing software for this Wangwriter is brilliant. But, what are we going to write with it? What better than a Christopher Walken speech! So come on along as we type up a script as if though we were living in 1981.
Check out Rich’s blog here:
ricapar.net/wang-writer-5503/
Everything on the Wangwriter will ultimately be available here:
github.com/Nakazoto/WangWrite...
Colin hooked me up with the Wangwriter, so check out his Facebook page for rare vacuum tubes:
/ 2009005339280149
I also borrowed a bit of footage from VCF, check out their YT channel here:
/ @vcfederation
If you want to support the channel please hop over to Patreon:
/ usagielectric
Also, we now have some epic shirts for sale!
my-store-11554688.creator-spr...
Come join us on Discord and Twitter!
Discord: / discord
Twitter: / usagielectric
Intro Music adapted from:
Artist: The Runaway Five
Title: The Shinra Shuffle
ocremix.org/remix/OCR01847
Thanks for watching!
Chapters
0:00 Story time
3:49 Let’s see that OS!
5:12 Getting the Archive Disk ready
8:04 Let’s start writing our script
17:08 Time to fix that printer
19:30 Let’s print out our script
22:23 I adore this machine!
24:00 The Lion Speech
25:39 Bunny!

[@Ricapar9x]

I'm speechless! This has been a wild ride and I never would've imagined this random machine I found in a storage locker a few years ago would've let me become part of a project like this. I'm so happy for folks like you who are equally dedicated to preserving these obscure parts of computing history. If you're ever in New Jersey, drinks are on me!

[@AttemptingAstro]

Cheers to you for the effort you put in, I'll definitely be checking out your blog!

[@UsagiElectric]

I'm so glad you were able to help, and I'm glad the machines got our paths to cross! Next time I'm up north, I'll be hitting you up for those drinks for sure!

[@andrewwright1200]

@@UsagiElectric Now to get it connected to the Centurion.

[@esra_erimez]

Wow, you guys are most impressive! Well done! Thanks for a great video.

[@chrislozaga4942]

@@UsagiElectricwould you like me to send you MultiMate? You said you’d like a DOS word processor that works like Wang and there was indeed a clone, MultiMate. I have the original disks and binder.

[@CapitalJeffDC]

I was something of a deity in the Wang Word Processing, OIS, and VS worlds. Wang totally dominated the WP market until around 1988. I cloned the Wang OIS user interface in 1983 and plopped it on the XT and AT as DOSMENU, a shell to keep people away from the bare C> prompt. It sold like hotcakes to my clients in the mid-to-late 1980s because the Wang UI was known by so many. At its peak it was on desktops in most of the Fortune 500. Tip: On menus you can use use the spacebar to move through the options in addition to typing the first letter.

[@runrin_]

having used full screen editors (vi, vim, and emacs) on a 9600 baud terminal quite a bit, i can tell you the reason that the line splits when you insert is so that text doesn't have to scroll to the right each time you type a new character. this can be very slow when you have a long line. splitting the line is a really nice touch that shows how they were focused on keeping the editing process fast, at the expense of maybe not looking quite as good. the bold/graphics characters are really cool too. this thing is like the ultimate typewriter. can you imagine working as a typist/secretary back when this came out and switching to this from one of those early magnetic tape-typewriter based word processors like the IBM MT/ST? or even worse just a selectric? this thing would have been mind blowing. it's still probably the ultimate system for someone who wants as little distraction as possible while doing creative writing, etc.

[@drstefankrank]

Except the loud fan, which would drive me crazy.

[@runrin_]

@@drstefankrank fans can be replaced. i'm sure there's enough juice in the psu for a nice quiet noctua. if not it'd be trivial to add it.

[@xmlthegreat]

The bright green phosphor can be a mite irritating. I think a nice orange tint monochrome screen (IBM made quite a few) would have worked best in this application.

[@micro-history]

Amazing video! My aunt used one of these Wangwriter models at a job she had in Vancouver in the 1980s. I remember her showing me how it worked, with the menus, and typing, and everything, back when I was a kid. Watching it happen again was a blast of nostalgia. One great feature of the Wangwriter is that it autosaves. You are forced to name the document before you create it, and it saves automatically in the background as you work, so you can't lose your work even if you lose power. I had to wait until the 2010s to get a system that worked that way again, with Scrivener on the Mac. Both Wordperfect and Microsoft Word were a step back in that regard, as they allowed you to create a new document with no name (I think Word eventually got some sort of "auto-restore" feature if your computer crashed, but it didn't always work)

[@themagicboy6548]

autosaving in 1981!

[@alextirrellRI]

What happens if I don't remember or know the name of the documents? I didn't see any kind of directory option.

[@micro-history]

@@alextirrellRI The directory option is called "Document Index". You can see it at 7:52. But it can only show the directory for one floppy at a time, so I hope you labelled your diskettes!

[@danek_hren]

No, mobile version of Office actually features autosave. Maybe it's the newer version's feature, I'm not sure, but it exists.

[@stigmarestroom]

In the early 80s I printed a 600 pages book on a daisy-wheel printer, with four different wheels (two sizes roman and italic). On each change of size or style the printer had to stop and wait for a manual change of the wheel. It took ages, but quality was far superior than with an 8 bit dot-matrix printer. It was using WordStar 3.0

[@R.Daneel]

You bring me back to my Micom Word Processor days. I recall that being amazingly intuitive as well. A few notable things I remember about that system: 1. The monitor lifted on a clamshell to reveal the system boards... which were wire-wrapped. 2. The keyboard was, by far, the best keyboard I have ever used. It was a joy to type on. Better even than the IBM Model-M. 3. It had 8" floppy disks. I was asked to convert some to IBM format. The company I found was asking about $150/disk (~1990 Canadian dollars). A price even they admitted was outrageous, given their 9KB (!) capacity. You could write small enough to get 9K of text on to an 8" disk! 4. It was daisywheel too. A sound that I'm still fond of. The printer was in a huge sound-dampening cover. 5. We were a scientific department and sent our daisywheels to an "old guy" who cut off several of the "petals" and replaced less-used characters with required science symbols. Also, a great feature of daisywheels: they worked really well with carbon-copy forms, which were the life-blood of business back then. Much better than the early dot-matrix printers of the time. Particularly if you were using a form with 5 or 6 copies.

[@SpaghettiEnterprises]

Oh wow crazy that you had to mechanically alter the print wheel to add more symbols

[@russellhltn1396]

Now we see why Wang was so successful. They understood the user was likely coming from typewriters and didn't expect them to have "mechanical knowledge" in understanding machines. As for why didn't they create a version to run on MS-DOS, it's a common issue of that period. Companies were too invested in their own product line (in this case Hardware) to introduce something that would kill their income. Seen it many times. I'll note that WYSIWYG is fine on a DOS screen when doing fixed fonts, but you have to go with something bitmapped to do proportional fonts (like Mac or Windows). So, even if Wang did a MS-DOS version of Wordwriter, there's a good chance it would have suffered the same fate as WordPerfect when Windows and laser printers came along.

[@retrozmachine1189]

Not only would it hurt their own hardware sales, there were already a slew of competent word processing programs out there that they'd have to compete with, and not just for the IBM PC. Things such as the Electric Pencil were available on a fair number of Z80 based systems including the TRS-80 I/III/IV. I used EP to write essays for highschool etc. EP even had 80 column support on the IV. Text mode WP was very popular in legal offices here. Why go to Windows which required new more powerful hardware, and *gasp* spending money to buy it, when that old PC or XT with text WP did the job nicely. It was not unusual to see a pool of ten girls typing away and sending documents to print on the shared DWP.

[@russellhltn1396]

@@retrozmachine1189 Sure there are competent programs, but having a familiar program that would take minimal re-training and already a standard would be attractive. (Not to mention being compatible with existing saved documents.)

[@dougingraham5807]

In fact Wang did sell a version of Wang word processing that ran under MSDOS. I think it was $125 for the software and special keyboard. I had hidden myself away for several months reverse assembling the the drivers for the printers that Wang sold. People wanted to use other printers and so I wrote drivers for them. At the end of life of the product I was supporting over 400 different printer models. Wang licensed the driver software and I received 25 cents per sale. I know that around a million of these keyboards were sold. What killed it was Microsoft Word running under Windows and Wang not wanting to add better support for proportional printing. There were limited hooks in the code for PS printing. I really liked the keyboard but I no longer have even a non-working one.

[@aphexteknol]

Not sure if anyone else has mentioned this, but part of the paper slippage problem could very well be down to the platen and rollers being old and hardened. Platens *should* have a rubbery grippy texture to them and not be rock hard. Yours seems like its shiny and likely hardened causing slippage. Good news is, a company called JJ Short can re-cover platens and rollers for this sort of thing. In the vintage typewriter world we use them a lot when restoring typewriters, and the same is true for daisywheel or other impact printers. Hope this helps!

[@TheGunnarRoxen]

We got a real actor in here! Excellent job Davd and Rich! Really cool to see it running. As a writer I am so jealous 😂

[@UsagiElectric]

Haha, thank you! It was definitely fun acting out that little bit at the end!

[@erikbraun2867]

I am so amazed you are able to find devices with CRTs in such good shape. It's still sharp, bright and no burn in. Also everything being good including the original ink ribbon. Damnn. Also I love you, no cliffhangers, straight to the point and you always do everything not leaving anything behind. You also put so much time to figure things out before turning on the camera so we can get the best experience. Just binge watched the whole Wang playlist and the Centurion playlist, and you are so fun and entertaining to watch.

[@tommythorn]

Congratulations on achieving the Holy Grail: the system disk. A just reward for an epic journey.

[@sophiespaan2995]

I have a pair of 1980s and a 1990s electric typewriter that use the ribbon and daisy wheel printing method, they're quite fun, especially when I get up to speed on typing. Perfect excuse for ear muffs.

[@russellhltn1396]

I'm not convinced the paper feed has a problem. I suspect the lever you're using releases the back rollers so they can't grip. (Like it does on a typewriter.) Try moving the lever forward and then releasing it rather than holding it. You also might try just starting to print from that first position to see if pulls the paper in before printing. (Keep in mind the system has to set the top margin, so I'd expect the paper's staging position to be below the print head.) The paper seem to feed perfectly once you have it loaded, so I'm thinking the issue is likely training rather than a fault of the unit.

[@AureliusR]

Possible, though I think he should also get some Rubber Renue and properly clean the rubber rollers.

[@michaelthomsen8771]

I wonder what the "to of page"button does...

[@russellhltn1396]

@@michaelthomsen8771 Good point! I also wonder if the machine can take more than one sheet of paper.

[@stephen1r2]

@@russellhltn1396 It would almost have to with the lack of speed or support fanfold tractors.

[@appleinfl]

You can use alcohol on most rollers as well. They can build up gunk over time on the surface that can cause them to slip.

[@BasicBitesCA]

Great to see this up and running! 19:45 - If your feed problem doesn't turn out to be something obvious (like a paper thickness setting), it's quite possibly due to the hardening/shrinking of the rubber over time. There's a product called Rubber Renue from MG Chemicals that is an industrial strength once-in-a-blue-moon treatment to be used sparingly, but does a fantastic job of restoring some of the bounce to old typewriter and printer platens (provided they haven't become so dry that they've begun to crack, in which case nothing will save them). I've used it once on each of my vintage typewriters/printers when cleaning them up thoroughly after purchase. 20:30 - Six LPI is what most typewriters do, and is the North American standard. Many dot matrix printers could be switched between 6 and 8 lpi; I've heard that the latter was preferred in various places in Europe. Now if only the Wangs writing scripts today had the class of 1981! -- JC

[@tstahlfsu]

Genuine great video! Love the Walken scene at the end 🤣

[@richardwaters9284]

While Wang never released the software for a PC, there was a popular package called MultiMate, which I understand was very close. We used it on the XTs and ATs in the bank I worked at in the mid to late 80’s

[@ChrisCandreva]

Yes. MultiMate's selling point was being keyboard compatible with Wang word processors, so that staff did not need to be retrained on it. My first job out of high school was setting up a bunch of XTs and ATs for my uncle's office, which included installing multimate.

[@PaulDriverPlus]

I've been wracking my brain trying to remember that program.

[@CapitalJeffDC]

I never considered MultiMate an actual Wang replacement. Keyboard is one thing but the UI was pretty funky. I ruled it out as a PC alternative at my clients because many were doing complex docs that were a breeze on Wang but took forever to get to work kindasortalike Wang. Ditto for Samna. Leading Edge had a wp package that looked and felt like Wang. Same glyphs, mostly the same keyboard. Unfortunately, it was 1984-ish and only came bundled with their hardware. Couldn't find out who the actual dev was to discuss possible broader distribution. They also had a program called Nutshell that worked a lot like Wang List Processing. It was from Nashoba Systems and eventually became Filemaker. Eventually, I abandoned the quest for a Wang-like wp package. For clients with IBM 5520s or DisplayWriters, I hooked them up with IBM PC Writer (5520 clone) or the PC version of DisplayWrite. In-house, I used WordPerfect until the mid-1990s when MS Office ate WP's lunch after their dreadful attempt at moving to Windows and the corporate drama that quickly reduced it to also-ran status. I've been using MS Word/Office since.

[@EmptyGlass99]

Now there's a blast from the past - I'd completely forgotten about MultiMate. I used it very briefly in the early 90s.

[@dougingraham5807]

I remember the Wangwriiter well. At the time I worked for a company that was a dealer for Wang. The board that tended to fail was the one that drove the stepper motors on the printer. We had several of these dead boards so one weekend we stole the connector off of one of those and made an RS-232 interface using some blue perfboard.. Once we had that working it was straightforward to generate a CPM boot diskette where the console was on a terminal. I still have that RS-232 interface in a box somewhere. Management thought we might be able to sell CPM for the Wangwriter but Wang didn't want us to do this. They wanted to sell this as a word processing appliance and that was enough reason not to pursue it further. I don't think I have the bootable CPM system disk anymore and I would be the only one who would have kept it. Thanks for bringing back my memories of this.

[@kevindahlberg7753]

That is a fantastic word processor and is still very much practical today. The sound of a typewriter is very nostalgic. For some reason, I expected it to sound like a dot matrix printer. It's amazing how quickly the world has changed in a short period of time.

[@melkiorwiseman5234]

That printer brings back memories of a computer daisy-wheel printer which I purchased for $50 because it was repeatedly blowing a tiny 0.1A on-board fuse. I soldered two wires into the board leading to a cartridge fuse holder so that I wouldn't destroy the PCB with repeated soldering/de-soldering and began testing the printer. It worked just fine most of the time, but every so often it blew that fuse and I had to replace it. I finally figured out that when it was blowing the fuse was when it switched off the cooling fan used to cool down the print head driver transistors, which could get pretty hot in continuous use. I wired a 0.1uF high-voltage-rated capacitor across the fan and that solved the problem. I eventually sold that printer for $500 (close to what it was worth new) since it was now reliable. Bunny: Are you going to feed me? Are you going to cuddle me? No? I'm out'a here!

[@djangowatson217]

I used to fix slipping printer rollers that slip because of dried-out rubber by lightly damping them with vaseline oil (i.e. gun/sewing machine lubricant light oil), and then soaking up the not-impregnated oil with paper towels. This somewhat restores rubber's grip. There are also commercial rubber "restorer" gels/pastes, mostly for hydraulic gaskets and other fittings that can't be easily replaced, you may want to try with that.

[@FrancSchiphorst]

I like the efficient back and forth the head makes printing both ways. Print looks crisp and awesome.

[@captainkeyboard1007]

In 1988, I saw the Wang OIS model at Control Data Institute. It was the second word processor I used. The IBM Displaywriter was the first word processor I used at the computer technology school. I prefer the word processor more than typewriting, even on the IBM Selectric typewriter. Today, I use Microsoft Word 2021, bundled in Microsoft Office 2021 Professional. I watched your show because I am a computer user and a fan of microcomputer technology. The disadvantage of using a standalone word processor is printing documents. Documents that have more than one printer font or typeface and at least two weights throughout the page(s), printer stops are applied in the electronic document. The user would likely need to change the daisy wheel, typeface element ball, or anything that has typefaces to be added to various text parts of the document. With word processing, I would not want to look back to using a typewriter, nor use anyone else's keyboard. In this year 2024, your show is still incredible.💙

[@beakt]

I love how the terminology reflects the currency of the idea that saving a document into magnetic media isn't so routine. You made a document, printed it, and moved on. If you needed copies you would use your copy machine. But in case you lose track of the paper document, you can keep an "archive" on a disk. These days, every document you might type is saved and we have virtually unlimited storage, and people hardly print anymore.

[@skeggjoldgunnr3167]

Great print quality and intuitive word processing is mastered here in one device. This is of value STILL TO THIS DAY to any writer that insists on doing stuff the RIGHT way. You HAND your publisher a stack of freakin' PAPER, man. That paper has letters on it that are clear and their font perfectly rendered. Like a typewriter did it. Not fuzzy or blurry. No yellow spots everywhere. On paper that feels like something when you hold it. White like it SHOULD be. The printing is IMPACT print and it shows. The paper has no other ink on it from a fuser or a dirty roller.

[@jxtq27]

Thanks for bringing this beautiful machine back to life. Too bad it worked so well, I enjoy watching you figure things out. Truly a testament to Wang's engineering and manufacturing though.

[@UsagiElectric]

Thank you! And don't worry, we still got a ton of things to troubleshoot on the Centurion, and I think we might try to make some custom cards for the Wangwriter at some point in the future.

[@bobweiram6321]

Back in high school, a local company had upgraded to brand new IBM PCs and donated their old Wang Processors to our school. They were the older cyberdeck style model with the all-in-one keyboard and CRT. What I remember most about it was its keyboard. Its keys couldn't be actuated unless the system was off, but once you power it on and start typing, you're greeted by an incredibly satisfying tactile feel with a crunchy, clicky, clacky sound generated by an internal solenoid. Although Wang never ported their word processor over to the PC, Leading Edge, a popular IBM PC clone manufacturer at the time, did offer an all-in-one IBM and Wang knock-off solution. In addition to running PC titles, it came with a word processor which had nearly identical screen layouts, menu structure and commands. To capture the full Wang experience, it even attempted to simulate the sensory experience with its keyboard which featured clicky Alps Blue SKCM switches. While it didn't come close to the Wang's, it is still regarded as one of the best keyboards ever made. Even today, it will often fetch a couple of hundred dollars even in poor condition.

[@russellhltn1396]

While the printing may seem slow, it was pretty quick for a typist. Keep in mind if the error was too bad, or not caught before ejecting the page, the entire page would have to be retyped. So, coming from typewriters, the Wang must have seemed like the best thing since sliced bread.

[@fallwitch]

I used this Wang word processing program back when I worked for the government. Brings back some memories. I enjoyed it esp as I was the last of the typewriter generation. Thanks for sharing.

[@525Lines]

My first job out of college, they had a wang mainframe system. I had to take their word processing training on a series of cassettes. The presentation style was radio DJ. Welcome to W-A-N-G!!!

[@jasonhoch7105]

A former boss and friend of mine (who sadly passed away) was originally a developer/programmer who worked on Wang Labs stuff right out of college in the early 80s. You mention how intuitive the writer is, and that’s one thing he never stopped talking about. He truly believed that Wang was a superior computing platform, and it would’ve been the standard had Microsoft or Apple not gained their market share at that time. He loved the system so much, he had an entire Wang mainframe in the back of the office where we all worked. Several terminals, floppy drives, and even a cartridge hard disk drive cabinet. When he died, his wife sadly had it hauled to the dump. For those of you wondering, the wang jokes never stopped. Best one was (his name was Russ): “Russ got married, and his wang is now just collecting dust.” I still think about his wang (ha), and it’s unfortunate his wife threw it away.

[@AttemptingAstro]

That really is a beautiful machine, with a much more beautiful interface than the word processors I've used like the 8 (I think?) line smith corona PWP. And although printing is slow, there's something satisfying about watching it go back and forth, typing forward and in reverse, as it makes its way through each page. I actually used to type papers on one as recently as 2014-2015 because it is so distraction-free. But ya, printing a 10 page document is definitely in the "go make a sandwich" timeframe, except that mine didn't have any automatic paper feed so every couple of minutes it needs a reload and unpause. Luckily, can hear it across the house so it isn't hard to keep track of when it's waiting for the next sheet. Congrats on getting this Wang working, and hey, who knows, maybe the Centurion Documentary will be typed on it? Haha

[@PlayerClarinet]

Does the Wang have an RS-232 port lurking somewhere? It'd be an interesting project to get the Centurion talking to the Wang as it did with the TI-99. Maybe both systems could act as terminals to the Centurion at the same time.

[@DavidRabbit]

My mom used to use a Wang Writer and then moved over into word processing/desktop publishing as a teacher. This makes me fully understand why she always preferred WordStar and WordPerfect over Microsoft Word.

[@PCFixer]

Holy CRAP, the sound of that Printer was amazing! That thing is awesome!

[@josephkarl2061]

Having grown up with TRS80s in the home, minicomputers at college and DEC terminals at the public library, the Wangwriter software is right up my alley. In 2023 I'm returning to university after a long break and I would happily do all my writing on that machine. It would still be as useful and practical now as it was when it was new.

[@franciscom.e.9780]

Wonderful work on this fine machine. I use very often a direct descendant of it: MultiMate 3.31, running on PC DOS 3.30 on an IBM AT 5170. Greetings from México.

[@MrLukealbanese]

This is sooooo good. Well done you guys!!

[@ejcrashed]

Absolutely amazing, that was quite a wild ride, thumbs up to Rich, people like him and you keep these old dreams alive

[@UsagiElectric]

Thank you so much!

[@mephustowest1876]

It has been great seeing the wang writer working. I loved this video.

[@Mark_Lawler]

Congratulations!!! What a great accomplishment! Thank you for allowing us to live vicariously through your videos during this great journey. I sat at one of these eons ago while at a meetup in the Wang Building near Culver City / El Segundo. It made no sense to me at the time as I was already well versed on WordStar in CP/M and then WordPerfect on DOS and it looked like a huge and expensive beast for such a simple function at the time. I remember with Wang's demise the building then became Microsoft's and then a Univision TV building before I fled L.A.

[@VincentGroenewold]

What an amazing ride this was, thank you for sharing, I just love these "community" projects and seeing stuff I've never witnessed back in the day is awesome. It being slow, ties directly into the pace of those days, much nicer. :)

[@jasonhoch7105]

So to add about the printer type: it’s called a daisy wheel printer. That is actually *quiet* for a daisy wheel printer. It’s slow because I assume it’s because it’s integrated into the computer, and if it were to go faster, it’d would literally shake the case apart. I at one time had an early 80s daisy wheel serial printer that operated at full speed. It was over 40lbs, and the case was solid metal. This was considered a “personal desktop” printer btw… One time I was printing several pages, the table beneath it shook apart. The printer had vibrated the screws loose, and broken apart the fiber board within the table. The print head was flung around so fast that the kinetic energy was staggering. It printed 1 line of 80 characters in a little over a second, and it took less than a second to return the carriage to the starting point. You could hear the thing printing 2 floors up in my house. The print was SO CLEAR though. Laser printer level clear. Of course the downside was in order to change the print size or font, you had to change out the entire daisy wheel. So, you couldn’t have a document containing multiple fonts or letter sizes on the same page. So if you think about it, it was absolutely amazing tech for the early 80s. Not only did the printer have to know what line it was on, but also where the print head was down to a single character, and also what letter was in front of the print head. All of this had to be in place… All in less than a second for each character being printed. Kinda miss that printer…

[@acoustic61]

Cool demo. In late 1983, I briefly worked in a repair center for the Coleco Adam computer. The system used a noisy daisy-wheel printer which contained the power supply for the entire system. It booted up as a word processor. As I recall, they used proprietary digital tape drives, which were failing like crazy. Along with countless other issues was a total POS!

[@allisonmacfarlane2891]

This is Fantastic!!! Thank you. A real trip down memory lane. I worked on a WANG system for a couple of years and loved it. Computer based word processors have never come close. A dedicated system was certainly superior.

[@InssiAjaton]

The print character wheel brought to my mind the word Wheelwriter. At this point I cannot remember whose trade name that was. But I still have a Qume printer that also uses those print wheels. What a totally beautiful printing result! Then, another thought: Porting the editor to a PC might be hampered by the special keys that you have on the Wang. Of course the PC keyboard has its Function keys, but you would at very least need a key name strip like there used to be available in the old days. Beyond that, you used to learn the WordStar special keys so well that several other programs coped them, whether they offered text editing, or something entirely different.

[@MarcelHuguenin]

Congrats to both of you, this was a great project. Once the daisywheel started whirring, it brought back a lot of memories. I immediately thought back of my Qume printers and thought this Wangwriter must be a 30 or 50 cps printer listening to the sound. At the time we developed interface boards with 6502 processors on it to interface between the 50-pin Qume bus and Commodore IEEE488 and RS232. I always wanted to know how the Wangwriters' wordprocessing interface would look and what you showed looked pretty awesome for that time. I have used WordStar quite a bit but this looked really intuitive. Thank you for restoring a wonderful 80s product and sharing it with us.

[@abx42]

I so am enjoying this little series. I never thought I'd hear it printing again can't wait for the next release.

[@demonjas]

I used to do interfacing between wang and Novell networking back in the early 1990s on later models of Wang computers. These were used extensively in law offices. Great to see some of this vintage gear back online.

[@N8Miniatures]

Awesome man! Killin it! Would be great to see this at a retro convention, would be awesome to write and print a resume or something with this!

[@TheVintageApplianceEmporium]

Absolutely love that machine. What a beauty!

[@BustaHymen]

About the lion speech... I recall once when I worked in Tanzania. Me and my colleague had a "minor incindent" (our driver rolled our car over in the middle of notwhere), so we couldn't get to where we were supposed to work in time. So a day off, and we were in the vicinity of Serengeti. We got a new driver and a new car and headed there. The entrance fee was pretty cheap if you drove by yourself, $50 if memory serves. We went in, and saw a huge array of different exotic animals. Way more than I thought were there. Zebras, giraffes, elephants, you name it. So I asked the driver "Any chance of lions?" "I doubt it." was thw reply. Well, we met up with some tourist type cab bus or what they are, and our driver flagged them down and asked if they spotted any lions. " no, and we have been here for five hours". We drove along and were happy with probably not seeing lions and just admiring the astonasing views, when suddenly the driver hit the brakes hard. I was like "what's wrong?", I was worried. "Lokk to the left" he replied. So I did, in not ten feet from our car were a pair oif lions (male and female) resting in the shadow of a tree. Both me and my friend started taking pictures of course. Then I politely asked the driver if it was ok to go out and pet them :D "NO NO, FOR GODS SAKE!" He didn't really got the joke :D Any way, after about 5-10 minutes or so of photoshoting the male got slightly upset. He roared and the driver said enough of this, let's go out of here and floored it. The morale? These are dangerous animals. If they're not close to dying, stay away. Human or hyena. That speech is crap.

[@BarnDoorProductions]

Thirty some years ago, I bought two Wang PCs from a tailgate sale of general stuff -- for $25! Both ran perfectly with 10 megabyte 'Winchester' drives. They were general purpose office machines and included (IIRC) WANG-DOS 3.0 and some dedicated software -- including Wangwriter, a Wang-specific spreadsheet and database and some other stuff. I never had a compatible printer though, so I never used them for real work. They went in a yard sale a few years later.

[@Pulverrostmannen]

This is really nice to see and it is actually a fact, you can get older stuff if you look real hard and it can be tough to find it, however it gonna be even harder to keep it working. well done!

[@_chrisr_]

Back in the 90s I acquired an old Globe Business Machines computer with 2 5.25" 360KB floppy drives and internal monochrome green screen. It was Z80 based with 64KB RAM. The software I had for it was Wordstar and that had a steeper learning curve it must be said! Unfortunately I sold that computer after I got a PC and I started using WordPerfect which was also pretty weird! It's great to see these old machines back to life!

[@paulcohen1555]

In the 80's worked at a company that sold CPT word processors. We had a daisy wheel printer with the same sound. There was a sound dampening enclose (which probably costed as a nice computer today) for office environment. BTW, there is a platen cleaner and conditioner liquid which you have to use. Does an amazing job.

[@TeslaTales59]

That's a very cool WP system. Reminds me of 80s vintage AppleWriter. Good work!

[@RetroJack]

Truly an Oscar-worthy perfomance!

[@TheFurriestOne]

Checking out Rich's blog on his repair attempts I'm reminded of an intriguing commonality with WANG devices. Wang seems to love their yellow bodge-wires, I see them on nearly every board I find in image searches! (and on my orphan WANG Z80 terminal motherboard)

[@2packs4sure]

You Wanged !!! Congratulations !

[@FinnBojorgensen]

Memories, memories,...In 1982, I printed out my PhD thesis on a daisy wheel printer like that, though not a Wang. I think it was from Texas Instruments. Typed the text on a CP/M-86 computer using Wordstar and with embedded runoff commands (no wysiwyg here...), ran the whole thing through runoff and printed on the daisy wheel printer.

[@idahofur]

So I was told the Word perfect was the copy to Wang Writer. But years of looking I could never confirm that. But apparently a program called MultiMate mimic how the Wang program work. Would be interesting to have a side / by side compare. Update: I loaded MultiMate 3.x into a virtual dos host. Yea, The menu looks and type page looks the same. :)

[@mikezimmermann89]

Yep! MultiMate was written to “emulate” Wang word processing behavior. If I remember the story correctly, a large insurance company had the “application” developed to mimic the Wang user interface in the IBM PC/microcomputer/DOS environment. This was done to ease the transition of their workforce to PCs by eliminating the need for everyone to learn a new word processing system. The developer hired by the insurance company retained the sales rights, and MultiMate was born.

[@brittman914]

The Leading Edge Word processor also functioned like this as well. It included spell check and had formatting capabilities too! Incredibly featured, I used it all the way through middle school when I was a kid.

[@philpots48]

I was a contract programmer at a bank on Wall St. There were 8 typists working the Wang WP system. When it was not working, someone would announce in a loud voice, "Can't get the Wang up!", we all laughed every time.

[@lyledal]

Your Walken is excellent!

[@greatquux]

This was good and I became a subscriber because of it. Looking forward to catching up! Though I would’ve gone with the “gold watch” monologue 😅

[@joshspranger7041]

Nice series, I remember the Wang stuff from when I used to work for Exxon Office Equipment (yup, that's when they tried to diversify away from gas and oil...), back then they had the Vydec Word Processor, whose claim to fame was a full page screen. Revolutionary at the time. They also had the Diablo daisy wheel printers. This series brings back fond memories.....BTW, good job on the hammer bumper adjustment, if that's too tight you will snap off printwheel petals. And too loose and you wont get a good impression.

[@frankowalker4662]

Fantastic acting. 10/10. I'm so glad you managed to get a system disc for the Wang. Ah, Daisywheel printers, so much better quality than Dot Matrix.

[@cocusar]

Logitech is a proud sponsor of Usagi Electric! hehe. excellent work on looking for that software disk, it'd be even nicer if the original cp/m disk can be found. but I bet the team you've gathered on your discord will improve the current cp/m port by decompiling this software. it's just a matter of time! thanks for all!

[@noisytim]

Congrats on the logitech deal! You deserve it :D

[@benjaminbaumgart3935]

This software reminds me of that which I had on an inherited Smith-Corona word processor. Of course, it had a smaller sceen and so was more difficult to use, but I can imagine they drew some "inspiration"!

[@n057828]

I used to work at a Data centre here in Melbourne Australia 🇦🇺 at the nab bank late 80s we had Kodak Komstars that used to produce microfiche. We had IBM 3800 laser printers. A whole floor for the mainframes impact printers tape librarians you name it I was 18!

[@gregmark1688]

The only thing I remember about Wang is that there's a 10 or 12 story building on Preston Rd near Beltline that used to have their logo on it. We called it the big wang, of course. It also had this amazing fountain out front that would reflect light in beautiful patterns on the buildings walls at night. I never see that nowadays; I think whoever owns the building now doesn't have it lit the same way, or something. Actually, I don't even know if the fountain is still there. I should ride my bike over there one of these upcoming summer-in-February days; I live less than half a mile from there, now. Oh, fun vid, btw, I've always wondered what their WP system actually looked like in use.

[@joe08867]

Great job, and great acting. I love that scene. I think everyone that's seen it have wondered what in the Wang is he talking about. Lol

[@jeromethiel4323]

Had a daisy wheel Wang printer that looks like the same mechanism that is in your Wang writer. Which is not surprising, as that printer was rock solid, and gave amazing print quality.

[@CheshireNoir]

OK so it's been several decades since I last worked on a printer with rollers like that, and not on this specific printer, but it's (IMO) likely to be one of two things. Either the springs holding the pinch rollers (They're the smaller rollers) are worn, or (more likely, considering the age) the platen roller (The big main one) has become polished and shiny. If it's the springs, just replace them with tighter springs. Just try a couple of different tensions to find the "right" tension. If it's the platen, you may need to _gently_ sand it back. (There are also chemical treatments, but without knowing more about it, I'm hesitant to suggest anything) You want it to grip when under tension, but not be so grippy that the paper doesn't detach and wraps around. Again, this is memories from long ago, so take with a pinch of salt :-)

[@mrtracywilliamson3809]

excellent n awesome love ole stuff

[@billklement2492]

Pretty cool! I haven't seen that screen for years! And Wang did try to market a PC version, but they were late to the PC game.

[@NavyDood21]

In the last couple of years I have really gotten into collecting old computers, from before my time. Windows 3.1 was the first OS I can really remember using, so it is super interesting to see these more odd examples of things I would never have known about.

[@UsagiElectric]

Same here! I grew up with late DOS and early Windows 3.1, but the machines from the early 80s and 70s really fascinate me. So many things we take for granted these days were so much more difficult to achieve then, and the engineers really came up with inventive and interesting ways to tackle them.

[@jxtq27]

@@UsagiElectric so when will you be restoring a Cray?

[@DougDingus]

Take a look at the Tektronics graphics workstations. They use storage CRT technology and are full vector machines. I used one in the late 80's and thought they were, and still are fantastic! "Tek 4052" will get you down the rabbit hole. One way they were used was to have the programs on tape cartridge and user data, in my case in the form of CNC machine g-code, on paper tape. One would load a program from tape cartridge and then load data from paper tape. Add, edit, whatever and then write data back out to paper tape, then write out a copy for shop use, done. The storage tube keeps any vectors drawn glowing, until the screen is refreshed. Resolution could go up to 4k! The one I used was 2k x 2k vector space, zero at center...

[@Colaholiker]

I remember PCs unlocking caps lock when you pressed shift for a long time (not sure but it may have been Windows 7 that first defaulted to not doing it, but in earlier days it sure worked - it may have been Vista, but I never worked with that). In fact, I still set all my computers to still do it, as I find it way more convenient and have little use to writing all caps but with just an occasional lower case letter inbetween. On my Linuxes, this, together with the "num lock is default active", this is the most important keyboard configuration.

[@Mueller3D]

In your B-roll of swapping the floppies, you put the archive disk in upside down. Anyway, nice to get the Wang software working. Still would be nice to get CP/M 3.x running and maybe try running Wordstar for comparison. And finally, see if you can implement a serial port on this thing, because why not?

[@KevinInPhoenix]

Wang did sell its word processing software for the IBM PC. The major issue was that it included a custom keyboard so that it would work just like a Wang word processing system or the Wang PC. This made the cost of the software/keyboard combo very high compared to other offerings at that time. Keyboards were expensive in the early 80s and swapping keyboards to use the Wang word processor was also a pain. I worked for Wang Labs in Lowell from 84-85.

[@pjcnet]

Never used Wangwriter, but I remember Wordstar very well on a Research Machines 380Z at school running with CP/M which later got replaced with 480Zs.

[@ianchard]

Fascinating stuff! It reminds me of the AM Comp/Set, which was like this but about a billion times more complicated. I'd love to see one of those again -- I wonder if there are any surviving examples?

[@dankappus7004]

Daisy wheel printers and nine point dot matrix are the sound of my childhood.

[@randywatson8347]

Really cool machine. The laserprinter did made its appearance not much later.

[@SeanBZA]

Rubber rollers get a bit of platen cleaner, should still be available for sale, used to clean and refresh typewriter and printer rollers. Caution it does destroy styrene, but cleans those rollers to a nice dull grippy surface. Available from printing shop suppliers as blanket cleaner, and you also get blanket wash, which removes ink residue from all the parts, but again both absolutely hammer a lot of plastics. Small stop you need a better material, though using adhesive lined shrink will work for a good amount of time, just need a few layers shrunk on to get the thickness.

[@KeritechElectronics]

You got yourself a fully operational hardware vim. Congrats! Cool editor indeed, and oh my goodness, that printer! Thing of beauty, joy for ever. Nasty molten rubber goo is a nightmare, not only when repairing tape decks.

[@c1ph3rpunk]

vim is later, vi was the original and was never designed as a word processor, it’s a text editor. nroff/troff is what was used for type setting, UNIX had no real word processor until much later. Prior to vi, ex was the editor used.

[@Lemon_Inspector]

Time to build a hardware vi out of -an- -Arduino- -discrete- -CMOS- -chips- vacuum tubes

[@TheErador]

TeX is what you need for typesetting.

[@chris08091]

amazing video

[@UsagiElectric]

Thank you!

[@nysaea]

That thing is so cool!!! :o

[@gabrielalamberti5860]

The ending...epic

[@produKtNZ]

Can I ask about the dog in the background with the French Fry hat? :D - it just made my day lol

[@whstark]

That was exciting . Good you found someone , I was wondering if a cpm system would work, but the printer was a problem, wang was a good one, I was a system engineer on the ATEX system in the same area, Used for law offices and News Papers. Such a good Area . I had word star on my home system. At the near end Xwri te was introdused and had swapable key maps , macros just like ATEX and was the most evolved word processor of the era.. , ATEX was word wide , see if you can find a pdp 11 with it running , 16 users per rack , New york times etc. Junk to them now. Atex gets no credit at all . Even the memory mapped video and A terminal just a crt and a masive serial keyboard with 4 levels .... Used word wide .... Like they did not exist. In my era I installed the Auto logic typesetters a crt based one used by all goverment offices, IBM, and most news papers even halmark and phone books, Then I went on with Atex.

[@arska6383]

I was kind of waiting for a video of this machine actually printing.

[@AiOinc1]

I dont know where you got "incredible intuitive" and "easy to follow" with a bunch of hidden and unlabelled key combinations to do your editing, but hey it's really cool that the machine works

[@MK-of7qw]

This was a pretty advanced word processor for the day.

[@PixelBrushArt]

Awesome stuff, my dude!

[@robertjay3251]

My first dos machine was the Wang PC. It had a simalar keyboard and word processor. But also ran dos 2.11 and had some compatability with PC. I don't believe that Wang word processor will run on PC compatable, but I found multimate word processor to be really close.

[@RudysRetroIntel]

Excellent work and video! Love watching your channel,very impressive! Question for you. Do you use a company to analyze your ROM? If so could you please pass long the name? Have a future project that needs a ROM to be analyzed. Thanks in advance and for sharing your adventures

[@cdl0]

Usagi Electric built a small, simple circuit to read roms. You can see it in one of the early episodes about the Centurion computer.

[@macgvrs]

Neat little machine. Glad you were able to revive it. Back in the days when typewriters were in daily use, there was a product, platen cleaner, that was used for cleaning platens. I think it would soften the rubber a bit as well as clean the platen. However, there came a time when the platen would get too hard and need replacing. A hard platen had two problems. One is that the paper could slip on the platen, pretty much what you have. The other is that it could damage whatever was being used to print the letters. In the case of a type bar typewriter, it would loosen the type head on the type bars. They are only held on by solder. I have had to re-solder and realign type type heads because of that. In your case, you are using plastic daisy wheels and I have seen those get mashed to the point where they could no longer produce clean print because the print wheel was damaged by the overly hard platen. Back then you could order a new platen and replace the old one. I didn't think that was an option anymore but I found this: www.jjshort.com/typewriter-platen-repair.php . They do recover platens! I imagine you won't be using the printer much but if you intend to use it a lot, you might want to preserve your daisy wheels by recovering your platen.

[@horusfalcon]

Egad! Compare this to MS-DOS word processors of the day... Wow. So very well done, both of you!

[@IkarusKommt]

Real word processors were much better than that.

[@horusfalcon]

@@IkarusKommt I cut my teeth on WordStar for CP/M, so, yeah... Most of the plain-text word processors of the day either derived from WordStar or EMACS... (Perfect Writer, I'm lookin' at you...) and were little more than what we would consider text editors with some "advanced" formatting features like justification. Yup, back in my day, we changed fonts by changing the daisy wheel on the printer, or the ball on the IBM typewriter/printer. 😆 By comparison, EMACS, Vi/Vim, and later text editors like KATE look very similar until you start using auto-completion and automated syntax highlighting and indenting. What most folks would accept as a "word processor" these days is a cut-down Desktop Publishing app. Compare what MS Word has become to what Aldus Pagemaker or Serif's PagePlus was in the late 80s & early 90s.