Wang Professional

[NeXT]

I picked this system up on my way back from VCF West. It's still in the car decontaminating with the rest of the haul but I was able to briefly look it over before brushing most of the dirt off.
No floppy or winchester drives came with it, but the drive brackets did. The unit itself is very dirty and was stored outside. Looking at the back slots it only has the local console and an I/O card installed. There might be more inside but I didn't yet get a chance to slide the cover off. It did however come with the monitor (no stand), monitor cable and the keyboard.

There's only a technical reference on bitsavers and no disk images. There is this site ( https://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/wangpc.html ) that goes way into the technical details and there looks to be some form of system diskettes on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/wang_professionalcomputersystemv122 ) but I'm not finding a whole heck of a lot else beyond it was an MS-DOS compatible machine and not PC compatible, much like my Apricots. Likewise not seeing a lot of people saying they got parts or compatible software.

 

[vwestlife]

Disk images of MS-DOS 2.10 and 2.10a for the Wang Professional PC:

MS-DOS 2.x

Originally 86-DOS, written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, DOS was a rough clone of CP/M for 8086 based hardware. Microsoft purchased it and licensed it to IBM for use with Microsoft's IBM PC language products. In 1982, Microsoft began licensing DOS to other OEMs that ported it to...

winworldpc.com

It was advertised as being compatible with "most" PC software:

 

[SomeGuy]

The Wang Professional Computer had high resolution monochrome graphics, unlike the IBM PC (before Hercules).

A 1983 Comdex video show a pre-release of Windows 1 running on Wang hardware with a much higher resolution.
A VisiCorp Visi On marketing video also prominently shows Visi On running at a high resolution on Wang hardware. (Although if a Wang Professional Computer specific version of Visi On actually shipped, it has been lost to time).

 

[NeXT]

Yeah I saw we talked about that COMDEX video about ten years ago and it was mentioned Windows saw an early build on the Wang but it was never seen again.

 

[SpidersWeb]

I've been useless/slack/slow at archiving but I do have a Wang Pro loaded with Word Perfect, Lotus 123 etc. I stopped using it so I could take the time to find a reliable way to backup the data.
I recently just got an MFM emulator, and was going to use that to archive the drive. The machine is in storage, but once I get it out I'll do my best to get that entire drive imaged and made available.

I also noticed "Wang Professional Software Series - MS Windows 2.03 - 8 disks, 1 set" in https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/wang-pc-software-new-arrival.60893/
I archived a lot of the Wang Professional disks in that lot, but I can't remember what the deal with the Windows 2.03 disks were, I'm going to guess they're for the Wang PC series but I should check again.

I'll try to do better and put more on archive.org and link here.

 

[NeXT]

Dug into it to clean and get the bugs out of it.
Looks to be almost a base model. Onboard ram plus an extra 128K. Dual floppy drives (were present but they aren't now) and the video board. I checked my inventory and all I got spare right now in full-height are single-sided drives.
Monitor internally was dirty but looks okay. Need to replace the base with something other than a loose bolt because the desk arm wasn't included and the original bolt is super rusty, so this has been sitting in the dirt.

 

[NeXT]

It's clean-er than it was. Now we can see what's inside.

As it turns out it works! Has a nice and bright screen too. I'll have to find replacement drives for it though.

The keyboard does not seem to be responsive. I get a beep and LED activity lights before the screen displays the BIOS sign-on but either the keyboard itself is dead or the system halts here until you give it a bootable disk.

Edited: The keyboard is of the foam/foil type, according to the internet. That absolutely explains why the keyboard does nothing....

 

[Jove]

I rebuilt my keyboard with the kit from TexElec to great success.

 

[SpidersWeb]

Beautiful. I have good news, in that I have a binary image of the Quantum Q540 that was in mine. I archived the transitions file and the extracted data, which looks legit.

It will go on archive.org and be shared but first I want to make sure I get any personal documents off - so does anyone know what I can use to mount a raw binary Wang Professional hard drive with?
Then I can share goodies - from memory it at least had WP5.1 and Lotus 123 and I remember seeing "Wang Version" on at least one of those.
(NB: I do not have the machine running at the moment, picture is from when it last ran)

Edit: I've found Word Perfect 5.1, Lotus 123, PC Write, Tommahawk (did it even run?), mostly seems to be just IBM software - but mine does have the IBM emulation adaptor in it. Would still be useful to get all the tools off I guess.

 

[NeXT]

While digging through my storage I found a pair of MPI B52's that were compatible, so I have a pair of supposedly good drives again.

After some fussing with the ID select jumpers I got both drives to be detected on POST but not surprisingly the beat up diskette I got with the machine was not bootable. There are disk images on the Internet Archive so I'll look into trying to write some of those out.

 

[NeXT]

So the Internet Archive has several sets of diskettes to choose from, presumably all for the Professional.

System 1.22
System 2.01
Computer Installation 1.0
Diagnostic Ver. 2423
Tutor 1.0

They are all archived as raw image files, so I can see their contents in Winimage and when written out under DOS using RAWRITE they seem to produce good 360k disks. The problem is that none of them seem to be bootable and I cannot tell if that's a system issue or whoever made the disk images. You put that into the drive and it gives you the above Disk Read error and leaves the drive spinning forever (as opposed to five seconds if you leave the drive empty and it reports as the drive isn't ready). I've tried four different floppy drives (which should work) and the symptom is identical. I need someone to confirm if the images are bootable and if how I'm creating them is appropriate.

 

[SpidersWeb]

Your method for recreating the diskettes is how I did it originally. When I got my first Wang Pro (like 2014? 2015?) I found Wang MS DOS 2.11 disk images and wrote them with rawrite for DOS, it booted right up.

The first disk image in your System 2.01 set starts with a jump instruction and contains the typical Wang disk header - so it has a boot sector and "***45 DISK READ ERROR" seems to be from that sector. There is also ***44 System Files Missing, and ***46 Defective Start Disk - I would have expected to see 44 on screen for non-system disks, so perhaps a disk issue like a seek or head signal not getting through? FDC bad? Just thinking out loud.

Edit: I noticed looking at my old posts, the machine I used the homemade disks on was "Professional Computer 2.50" - but yours is only 1.02 - just wondering if that might be an issue too.

 

[NeXT]

Hmm. That was one thing I checked when I cleaned the drives was if they could step the heads. When I put them in the Wang I had the m full extended as to see if the machine would bring them back to track 0, which they did. If it can see the drives, pull them back to track 0 and it's able to pull good data off the first track it could very well be that it's failing after that to advance the heads but I'm not sure why that would be the case since it was able to do it when it initialized. Is there anything special about how the drives are jumpered/terminated? Both these MPI drives came with the jumper plugs missing so I had to much with them a bit before both would be detected and it would specifically boot from A. Perhaps the Drive Select is still wrong?

 

[Chuck(G)]

Do your drives output READY/ or DISK CHANGED/ on pin 34?

 

[NeXT]

The manual for the drive implies pin 34 is a "spare", so no.
That I am aware the MPI B52 is a clone of the Tandon TM-100. Looking at other Wang photos (my god this sounds dirty) it looks these used to ship with Tandon/Shugart mechanisms

 

[Chuck(G)]

Just wondering if the system requires one or the other. For example, I have a Tandon TM-100-4M with a small board added on (plugs into a header) that provides the READY/ signal. There were, after all, many versions of the basic TM-100.

 

[NeXT]

I can ask the person who I got the system from but it might take a few weeks. He swiped the drives for his S100 machine. I could also just take the whole system down to the coast and we can throw the drives back in with my new diskettes and see what happens.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Do your drives output READY/ or DISK CHANGED/ on pin 34?

I found a scan of the Wang Professional tech reference manual on Bitsavers; annoyingly it doesn't seem to have a diagram of the pinout of the floppy controller board; however, on page 6-8 under "FLOPPY DISK CONTROLLER INTERRUPTS" there's a detailed description of how opening the doors on the disk drives generates "door-disturbed" interrupts, so... it seems like the Wang might indeed care about disk-change lines.

Don't 3.5" floppy drives pretty universally have disk-change support? Maybe you could write a boot disk image to a 720K disk and try booting with that. Of course you'll have to deal with cabling monkeyshines.

Unfortunately the section of the tech manual about boot-time errors was pretty useless. It says "***45 DISK READ ERROR" means "Disk Read Error". THANKS!

 

[Chuck(G)]

On some 3.5" drives, it's configurable (e.g. Teac FD-235F). Some Citizen (Fujitsu-badged) drives have Ready on Pin 2 and Disk Changed on 34. Used on Mitsubishi/Mazak PLCs of a certain age. The Samsung SFD-321B has a bunch of pads that can be jumpered any way you'd like. Many of the jumpering options on the Teac FD235HF slowly vanished, eventually winding up at the "Fixed DS1" variety with no jumpers.

 

[acgs]

Just a shot in the dark here:

What about trying to boot the system with only one drive installed? With configuration in question, maybe the two drives are set up so that they are both talking on the same line at the same time.

It you can get it to boot with a single drive, then you would know the problem lies in having two drives conflicting with each other.