Inventor and co-founder of Wang Laboratories, Wang transformed business computing through pioneering work in calculators, word processors, and minicomputers. Wang founded Wang Laboratories in June 1951 as a sole proprietorship. By 1970 the company had sales of $27 million and 1,400 employees. Wang began manufacturing word processors in 1976 based on the Zilog Z80 processor. Typical installations had a master unit (supplying disk storage) connected to intelligent diskless slaves which the operators used. Connections were via dual coax using differential signaling in an 11-bit asynchronous ASCII format clocked at 4.275 MHz.
In addition to calculators and word processors, Wang's company diversified into minicomputers in the early 1970s. The Wang 2200 was one of the first desktop computers with a large CRT display and ran a fast hardwired BASIC interpreter.
