wang 1220 photos & info

[Jim Battle]

About three weeks ago I asked whether a shipping quote I received was 
reasonable or not.  The item arrived today, so I figured I'd tell how 
the story turned out.

Bradley Slavik had a Wang 1220 that he wanted to give up to get back 
some room.  He kindly gave me the machine, and even dropped it off at my 
sister's house.  Then I had to find a way to get it from Chicago to Austin.

Background: Wang shipped the first dedicated word processor in 1971, the 
Wang 1200.  The one I received is a slightly later model.


I received two suggestions for shippers: Craters & Freighters (I already 
knew about them) and Novas (gonovas.com).  Both gave similar quotes, but 
this particular Novas office just made a bad impression.  They would say 
they'd call back that afternoon, and then wouldn't, and I'd call them 
the next day, and they'd say, Oh, sorry, that was bad and I rarely do 
that.  Once is understandable, but three times in a row doesn't make a 
good impression.

So Craters and Freighters it was.  They picked it up two Fridays ago, 
within 24 hours of me giving them the business.  The following Tuesday 
they said it was crated and ready for shipment.  Last Friday I got a 
call from the subcontracted shipper that they were in Texas and would 
deliver it today, Monday.  They gave me a 3 hour window and delivered it 
in that window.  The box was in good shape.

Once I opened it I could see that the shipping container was well made 
and I had gotten my money's worth.  After half an hour of pulling 
staples and folding large sheets of cardboard, I had my very own Wang 
1220 word processor.  It was born on Aug 1, 1973, making it a bit more 
than 35 years old.

It cost $495 for the pick up, boxing, and delivery.  While it has been 
rare for me to spend that much on any vintage equipment, I am happy with 
the way it worked out.

I've posted a few photos, in small (50kB 640x480) and large (1MB 
2300x1700).  Eventually I'll have a web site, but this will have to do 
for now.

	http://www.thebattles.net/wang/1220/small
	http://www.thebattles.net/wang/1220/large


Things to note, in no particular order:

The 1220 is the second generation 1200.  The first came out in 1971. 
Both systems used modified Selectrics for keying and printing.

There is a famous story where Wang alleges that IBM purposely sabotaged 
the OEM'd Selectrics to damage Wang's reputation with customers.  In any 
event, the 1200's were notoriously unreliable.  A few years later, Wang 
took another shot at it with an 8080 & CRT based word processor system, 
which ended up making Wang quite profitable for a time.

the "05-rear.jpg" photo shows the microcode program store.  The 
microword is 44b wide, and the ALU is bit serial.  The whole electronics 
package is on a hinged frame.  You can see only the rear of the 
backplane the photo, but there are a handful of cards on the other side 
implementing the CPU.  The microcode store is 2K words of 44b.  The 
board holding the microcode also has a grid where diodes can be soldered 
in to allow patching up to three arbitrary words of the ROM.  Later on 
they introduced a board that allowed for 12 patched words.  There is no 
way to load software into the machine -- it only runs what is in its ROMs.

The CPU's memory is all of 256 bytes.  100 bytes are used to hold the 
current record being edited.  The rest contains variables state that the 
microprogram uses to track things.

"04-hood.jpg" shows that the noise damping foam has all disintegrated. 
The first thing I did was to get a putty knife and scrape it all into 
the garbage.  This hood sits over the Selectric, but the Plexiglas 
hinges up and out of the way for use.

There are two cassette decks on top.  they are used in various ways, but 
one common way was to have the source version on one tape and as the 
typist makes corrections, the edited copy goes out to the other deck. 
the system allowed editing in place, but as the tape format consists of 
nothing but a train of fixed length 100 byte data blocks, in-place edits 
could neither insert nor delete lines.  Another use was to have a 
template document in one deck and a list of contacts in the second deck, 
and the machine would print out form letters customized by the contents 
of the second tape.

The 09-warning.jpg sticker shows that the older machines used rope ROMs. 
  This is a technology whereby word lines were snaked through 44 toroid 
cores.  By having a given word line wind a given core or not it would be 
sensed as a 0 or 1.  This model uses mask ROMs.

Luckily, I happen to have schematics for this machine.  A few years back 
I was loaned a box of schematics to scan for the Wang 2200, but it also 
contained schematics for some other Wang products.  At the time I had no 
thought of having a 1200 (I didn't even know any still existed), but now 
I'm glad I went and scanned everything.  Who knows, maybe some day I'll 
run out of things that need to be done to my existing emulators and I'll 
write one for the 1220.  It would be the world's most boring emulator, 
though.

My office now has a strong aroma of whatever oils and greases that were 
applied to the Selectric probably 20 years ago.  I'm amazed how volatile 
it still is.

Finally, my 2200 website has a 6 page color brochure touting the amazing 
features of the Wang 1200 family (6 pages, 1.5 MB):

	http://wang2200.org/docs/Wang%20Word%20Processing.pdf

The collage of very early 70s people on the cover of the brochure is 
worth the price of the download.