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Wang Professional

I'm getting ready to put this machine away again after letting it kick around for the last week as I poked at it on and off and it's weird in ways I can only blame Wang messing with things.
You let it fully boot up into Wang's menu system it leaves a LOT to be desired. Lots of menus listing services and programs that are not installed in the machine while it prompts for countless disks you don't have. Feels like it's not entirely configured for this machine over something with a hard drive.
The other is that disk and DOS control is getting messed with. You DIR a drive it will do it, once. No matter how much you play with the disk_change line or swap floppies it will never again look at the drive. Likewise advanced DOS commands like /dir W stop working, which is....odd.
On the other hand, you let it partially boot and DOS and the drives behave like you expect, so I'm nailing this one down on Wang's meddling. The machine is neat but I don't have the space to keep it setup, so into storage it goes.
 
Pressing Ctrl-C at the DOS prompt should force it to re-read the disk rather than go by its cache of the directory.
 
NeXT said:
Well ultimately I may not use these drives due to ongoing issues. We've nailed down the software issues and I've extensively tested the drives on another system but something about the Wang......doesn't like them.

I've tried multiple combinations at this point and something about how the Wang handles floppy drives is weird. I can write out our known good boot disk from several different and known good drives and then booth the Wang. With a single drive installed 25% of the time it works. Other times it gives read errors again. Other times it starts to boot, then hangs. Other times it boots but it doesn't detect a disk change. (and yes I'm aware we have pin 34 held open but it's hit and miss if the DIR command makes the drive load the heads and check the ToC) You add in a second drive and the above still applies, but on boot you may or may not get the controller signalling both drives at once (remember, both drives are set to DS0, but you try and give then different DS selections and one or both drives go missing, so this seems deliberate on Wang's part) and things get lost in a read. Typically for me it's right at the same point and it will fail to load the printer driver and process config.sys, so instead of the fancy WANG logo you just get a DOS 2.10 prompt for the time and date.
Switch drives around, try different cables, add a termination resistor to the second drive (but Wang's being special and there's a dedicated ribbon cable for each drive rather than one long cable so I dunno what they are doing) fix cold solder on the power connectors and even replace the shunt sockets for the drive selects. Nothing fixes the problem. Switch out one of the drives with a half-height Fujitsu 360k floppy drive and tell it to boot from that. Flawless.
If I find more of the Tandon drives this originally came with I'll put those in but at this point if I keep working on this I'm going to rip out whatever is left of the hair on my head, so I'm setting this machine aside again.
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Are this the original wang drives? The Wang can boot from drive A: or B:, not only from A:, that is the reason why it has two separate cables.
 
These are NOT the original Wang drives. PO bought the system to pilfer the drives for another CP/M machine and offered me the machine, minus the drives. These MPI drives are something I've had in storage for probably a decade now.
 
NeXT said:
These are NOT the original Wang drives. PO bought the system to pilfer the drives for another CP/M machine and offered me the machine, minus the drives. These MPI drives are something I've had in storage for probably a decade now.
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OK, the Wang Drives have an extra Microswitch to Check If the door is closed or open and that is necessary.
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A second Wang PC has materialized.

The seller is a lurker here (or apparently word's getting out there's a computer guy in the Interior who regular's an AMC station wagon) and we crossed paths on FBM after it was for sale for a number of weeks but I bit the bullet last weekend and drove over to pick it up.
This one is in better condition. No memory expansion but it came with the IBM MDA emulation board (and the medium resolution monochrome display), one good half-height Panasonic floppy drive and a working 10mb NEC hard drive and Winchester controller, plus a mountain of documentation I need to scan now.
Slightly unrelated but last month I was given a pair of unrestored DS-DD MPI 5.25" drives so now we have the ability to try a different set of drives in the first Wang machine, as well as test against a floppy drive from another Wang that is known good and working.
The two possible replacements need some attention so I've oiled their spindle and head stepper bearings and I'll see if they free up but in the meantime I've pulled the first Wang PC out of storage so we can get back to this (RIP, chuck ;-; )
 
Glad to hear you got another one, always nice to have two of a kind just in case. I found one of these at the end of 2024 locally here in Minnesota and I fixed it up, your post here on the forums was helpful, thanks! In summary I had a pretty easy time getting mine going again, but details are here...
writtenoutput.blogspot.com

Wang Professional Computer from 1984

At the end of last year (Dec 2024) I was browsing Facebook Marketplace and saw a somewhat interesting computer that I had never heard of be...
writtenoutput.blogspot.com writtenoutput.blogspot.com

Anyway, if you do scan in the documentation that would be most helpful, I didn't get any documentation with my machine. Best of luck with the second restoration.
 
It's going to take me a few days to scan the documentation but now compared to then, I have a nice book binding machine and ADF system now that makes quick work of these books. Problem is that Bitsavers is unavailable for new material for the next two months at least.
 
I got a Wang Professional a few years ago, saved from the scrapper. It is complete with keyboard and monitor, but the monitor cable needs attention and the connectors as well. Last time I tried, the computer came to life but no image. The monitor worked for a few seconds and then it lost power.
Mine came with one floppy drive and a hard drive installed. It will be a future project, it is in storage until I have time to restore/clean it.
 
NeXT said:
This one is in better condition. No memory expansion but it came with the IBM MDA emulation board
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Nice find. I'm guessing this board is meant to provide MDA-like text buffer and attributes - does it work with Wang's own mono display, or is it intended for 5151-frequency monitors? (Or perhaps both)?
 
I'll scan the manual for the PC emulator but it does seem to provide MDA-level video support and I can confirm it makes Lotus 123 work, however anything that still tries to make a BIOS direct call or needs ROM BASIC will not work.
 
Wang had three different boards promising IBM compatibility, the best being the "CGI" (Character/Graphics/IBM) board (PC Magazine, October 1985):

wangboards.png
 
NeXT said:
I'll scan the manual for the PC emulator but it does seem to provide MDA-level video support and I can confirm it makes Lotus 123 work, however anything that still tries to make a BIOS direct call or needs ROM BASIC will not work.
Click to expand...

I’d think that anything that’s trying to be even partially PC compatible would have to emulate most of the int 10h calls. (Along with some of the other major categories like keyboard related stuffs.) Even notoriously incompatible MS-DOS machines like the Sanyo MBC and Tandy 2000 implemented half-@ssed compatibility layers for these after it was clear that restricting to just the MS-DOS API (IE, the one that’s an extended version of the CP/M api) wasn’t going to work.(*)

(* early NEC machines tried this along with some others, probably including the WANG, but there wouldn’t be much point to an IBM video card peripheral unless it at least partially redid that.)
 
I haven't touched these in ages and the doc has spread across the basement along with all the disks but I can look if there is something specific needed.
The thicker one is an APC.

PXL_20260330_210225414.jpg

PXL_20260330_210239887.jpg
 
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