Centronics Data Computer Corporation was an American manufacturer of computer printers, now remembered primarily for the parallel interface that bears its name, the Centronics connector .
114-483: Centronics began as a division of Wang Laboratories . Founded and initially operated by Robert Howard (president) and Samuel Lang (vice president and owner of the well known K & L Color Photo Service Lab in New York City), the group produced remote terminals and systems for the casino industry. Printers were developed to print receipts and transaction reports. Wang spun off the business in 1971 and Centronics
228-574: A DC bias on the drum surface to ensure a uniform negative potential. Numerous patents describe the photosensitive drum coating as a silicon "sandwich" with a photocharging layer, a charge leakage barrier layer, as well as a surface layer. One version uses amorphous silicon containing hydrogen as the light-receiving layer, boron nitride as a charge leakage barrier layer, as well as a surface layer of doped silicon , notably silicon with oxygen or nitrogen which at sufficient concentration resembles machining silicon nitride . A laser printer uses
342-432: A New York Stock Exchange company and soon changed its name to Centronics Corporation in 1987. After using the proceeds of the sale to purchase Ekco Housewares in 1988 for $ 125 million, Centronics changed their name to Ekco Group, Inc . The Centronics 101 (introduced 1970) was highly innovative and affordable at its inception. Some selected specifications: The connectors developed for its parallel interface live on as
456-455: A Z80 ) and 64 KB of RAM (less than the original 1981 IBM PC ). Disk storage was centralized in a master unit and shared by the workstations, and the connection was via high-speed dual coaxial cable "928 Link". Ahead of IBM and Xerox , Wang captured the lead for "the 'intelligent' printer: a high-speed office copier that can be linked electronically" to PCs "and other automated equipment". A year later, The New York Times described
570-412: A buffer underrun (where the laser reaches a point on the page before it has the dots to draw there), a laser printer typically needs enough raster memory to hold the bitmap image of an entire page. Memory requirements increase with the square of the dots per inch , so 600 dpi requires a minimum of 4 megabytes for monochrome, and 16 megabytes for color (still at 600 dpi). For fully graphical output using
684-481: A corona wire positioned parallel to the drum or, in more recent printers, a primary charge roller, projects an electrostatic charge onto the photoreceptor (otherwise named the photoconductor unit), a revolving photosensitive drum or belt, which is capable of holding an electrostatic charge on its surface while it is in the dark. An AC bias voltage is applied to the primary charge roller to remove any residual charges left by previous images. The roller will also apply
798-511: A laser beam back and forth over a negatively charged cylinder called a "drum" to define a differentially charged image. The drum then selectively collects electrically charged powdered ink ( toner ), and transfers the image to paper, which is then heated to permanently fuse the text, imagery, or both to the paper. As with digital photocopiers , laser printers employ a xerographic printing process. Laser printing differs from traditional xerography as implemented in analog photocopiers in that in
912-637: A raster image , they nonetheless outperform the 1984 LaserJet in nearly all situations. Laser printer speed can vary widely, and depends on many factors, including the graphic intensity of the job being processed. The fastest models can print over 200 monochrome pages per minute (12,000 pages per hour). The fastest color laser printers can print over 100 pages per minute (6000 pages per hour). Very high-speed laser printers are used for mass mailings of personalized documents, such as credit card or utility bills, and are competing with lithography in some commercial applications. The cost of this technology depends on
1026-464: A Xerox 7000 copier to make SLOT (Scanned Laser Output Terminal). In 1972, Starkweather worked with Butler Lampson and Ronald Rider to add a control system and character generator, resulting in a printer called EARS (Ethernet, Alto Research character generator, Scanned laser output terminal)—which later became the Xerox 9700 laser printer. In 1976, the first commercial implementation of a laser printer,
1140-433: A combination of factors, including the cost of paper, toner, drum replacement, as well as the replacement of other items such as the fuser assembly and transfer assembly. Often printers with soft plastic drums can have a very high cost of ownership that does not become apparent until the drum requires replacement. Duplex printing (printing on both sides of the paper) can halve paper costs and reduce filing volumes, albeit at
1254-693: A dedicated Intel-based word processor called the Wang Office Assistant in 1984. This was marketed and sold successfully in the UK to a specific few office equipment dealers who were able to upgrade their clients from electronic typewriters to the Office Assistant. They proved to be very reliable and fast when connected to the Wang bi-directional printer, providing cheap but very fast word processing to small companies (such as solicitors ). The USA
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#17327733736761368-429: A heated transfer roller instead of a fuser, that melts the charged ink particles before applying them to the paper. Color laser transfer printers are designed to produce transfer media which are transfer sheets designed to be applied by means of a heat press . These transfers are typically used to make custom T-shirts or custom logo products with corporate or team logos on them. 2-part Color laser transfers are part of
1482-405: A laser because lasers are able to form highly focused, precise, and intense beams of light, especially over the short distances inside of a printer. The laser is aimed at a rotating polygonal mirror which directs the light beam through a system of lenses and mirrors onto the photoreceptor drum, writing pixels at rates up to sixty-five million times per second. The drum continues to rotate during
1596-428: A laser printer is somewhat delicate and, once damaged, often impossible to repair. The drum, in particular, is a critical component: it must not be left exposed to ambient light for more than a few hours, as light is what causes it to lose its charge and will eventually wear it out. Anything that interferes with the operation of the laser such as a scrap of torn paper may prevent the laser from discharging some portion of
1710-414: A laser. "Exposing" is also known as "writing" in some documentation. As the drums rotate, toner is continuously applied in a 15- micron -thick layer to the developer roll . The surface of the photoreceptor with the latent image is exposed to the toner-covered developer roll. Toner consists of fine particles of dry plastic powder mixed with carbon black or coloring agents. The toner particles are given
1824-527: A low-cost desktop laser printer. Canon then began work on a much-improved print engine, the Canon CX, resulting in the LBP-CX printer. Having no experience in selling to computer users, Canon sought partnerships with three Silicon Valley companies: Diablo Data Systems (who rejected the offer), Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Apple Computer . In 1981, the first small personal computer designed for office use,
1938-538: A nearly invisible dot raster , for the purpose of traceability. The dots are yellow and about 0.1 mm (0.0039 in) in size, with a raster of about 1 mm (0.039 in). This is purportedly the result of a deal between the US government and printer manufacturers to help track counterfeiters . The dots encode data such as printing date, time, and printer serial number in binary-coded decimal on every sheet of paper printed, which allows pieces of paper to be traced by
2052-445: A negative charge inside the toner cartridge , and as they emerge onto the developer drum they are electrostatically attracted to the photoreceptor's latent image (the areas on the surface of the drum which had been struck by the laser). Because negative charges repel each other, the negatively charged toner particles will not adhere to the drum where the negative charge (imparted previously by the charge roller) remains. A sheet of paper
2166-513: A page description language, a minimum of 1 megabyte of memory is needed to store an entire monochrome letter - or A4 -sized page of dots at 300 dpi. At 300 dpi, there are 90,000 dots per square inch (300 dots per linear inch). A typical 8.5 × 11 sheet of paper has 0.25-inch (6.4 mm) margins, reducing the printable area to 8.0 by 10.5 inches (200 mm × 270 mm), or 84 square inches. 84 sq/in × 90,000 dots per sq/in = 7,560,000 dots. 1 megabyte = 1,048,576 bytes, or 8,388,608 bits, which
2280-832: A personal relationship with his neighbor, Max Hugel , the founder and president of Brother International, the United States arm of Brother Industries, Ltd. , a manufacturer of sewing machines and typewriters. A business relationship developed when Centronics needed reliable manufacturing of the printer mechanisms—a relationship that would help propel Brother into the printer industry. Hugel would later become executive vice president of Centronics. Print heads and electronics were built in Centronics plants in New Hampshire and Ireland, mechanisms were built in Japan by Brother and
2394-430: A product named NPL (originally named Basic-2C). Kerridge Computer, now a part of ADP , created a product named KCML. Both products support DOS , Windows , and various Unix systems. The BASIC-2 language was enhanced and extended by both companies to meet modern needs. Compared to the 2200 Wang hardware, the compiled solutions improved speed, disk space, memory, and user limits by tens to hundreds of times; although there
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#17327733736762508-503: A real product) was introduced in January 1965. Using factor combining , it was the first desktop calculator capable of computing logarithms , which was quite an achievement for a machine without any integrated circuits . The electronics included 1,275 discrete transistors . It performed multiplication by adding logarithms, and roundoff in the display conversion was noticeable: 2 × 2 yielded 3.999999999. From 1965 to about 1971, Wang
2622-542: A shrinking market. Wordplex was taken over by Norsk Data . The market for standalone word processing systems collapsed with the introduction of the personal computer. MultiMate , on the IBM PC, and MS-DOS PC clones, replicated the keyboard and screen interface and functions of the Wang word processor, and was actively marketed to Wang corporate users, while several other WYSIWYG word processing programs also became popular. Wang did make one last play in this arena, producing
2736-507: A single cluster . Unlike the other product lines, such as the VS and OIS (described below), Wang used value-added resellers (VARs) to customize and market 2200 systems. One such creative solution deployed dozens of 2200 systems and was developed in conjunction with Hawaii - and Hong Kong –based firm Algorithms, Inc . It provided paging (beeper) services for much of the Hong Kong market in
2850-414: A slower page-printing speed because of the longer paper path. Formerly only available on high-end printers, duplexers are now common on mid-range office printers, though not all printers can accommodate a duplexing unit. In a commercial environment such as an office, it is becoming increasingly common for businesses to use external software that increases the performance and efficiency of laser printers in
2964-403: A two-step process whereby the color laser printers use colored toner (dry ink), typically cyan , magenta , yellow , and black ( CMYK ); however, newer printers designed to print on dark T-shirts utilize a special white toner allowing them to make transfers for dark garments or dark business products. The CMYK color printing process allows for millions of colors to be faithfully represented by
3078-455: Is just large enough to hold the entire page at 300 dpi, leaving about 100 kilobytes to spare for use by the raster image processor. In a color printer, each of the four CMYK toner layers is stored as a separate bitmap, and all four layers are typically preprocessed before printing begins, so a minimum of 4 megabytes is needed for a full-color letter-size or A4-size page at 300 dpi. During the 1980s, memory chips were still very expensive, which
3192-741: Is limited by their resolution (typically 600–1200 dpi) and their use of just four color toners. They often have trouble printing large areas of the same or subtle gradations of color. Inkjet printers designed for printing photos can produce much higher quality color images. An in-depth comparison of inkjet and laser printers suggest that laser printers are the ideal choice for a high quality, volume printer, while inkjet printers tend to focus on large-format printers and household units. Laser printers offer more precise edging and in-depth monochromatic color. In addition, color laser printers are much faster than inkjet printers, although being generally larger and bulkier. Many modern color laser printers mark printouts by
3306-461: Is more roller contact time for the toner to melt, and the fuser can operate at a lower temperature. Smaller, inexpensive laser printers typically print slowly, due to this energy-saving design, compared to large high-speed printers where paper moves more rapidly through a high-temperature fuser with very short contact time. As the drum completes a revolution, it is exposed to an electrically neutral soft plastic blade that cleans any remaining toner from
3420-566: Is no Wang support for the 2200, many software applications continue to function. During the 1970s, about 2,000 Wang 2200T computers were shipped to the USSR . Due to the Afghan war in the 1980s, US and COCOM export restrictions ended the shipment of Wang computers. The Soviets were in great need of computers. In 1981, Russian engineers at Minpribor 's Schetmash factory in Kursk reverse engineered
3534-408: Is suspended in the center of the hollow tube, and its infrared energy uniformly heats the roller from the inside. For proper bonding of the toner, the fuser roller must be uniformly hot. Some printers use a very thin flexible metal foil roller, so there is less thermal mass to be heated and the fuser can more quickly reach operating temperature . If paper moves through the fuser more slowly, there
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3648-440: Is then rolled under the photoreceptor drum, which has been coated with a pattern of toner particles in the exact places where the laser struck it moments before. The toner particles have a very weak attraction to both the drum and the paper, but the bond to the drum is weaker and the particles transfer once again, this time from the drum's surface to the paper's surface. Some machines also use a positively charged "transfer roller" on
3762-437: Is too high, the toner will not fuse well to the paper and may flake off after printing. If the fuser is too hot, the plastic component of the toner may smear, causing the printed text to look like it is wet or smudged, or may cause the melted toner to soak through the paper to the backside. Different manufacturers claim that their toners are specifically developed for their printers and that other toner formulations may not match
3876-560: Is typically an aluminium gallium arsenide (AlGaAs) semiconductor laser ), which emits red or infrared light. The drum is coated with selenium , or more recently, with an organic photoconductor made of N-vinylcarbazole , an organic monomer . There are typically seven steps involved in the process, detailed in the sections below. The document to be printed is encoded in a page description language such as PostScript, Printer Command Language (PCL), or Open XML Paper Specification (OpenXPS). The raster image processor (RIP) converts
3990-502: Is why entry-level laser printers in that era always came with four-digit suggested retail prices in US dollars. The primitive microprocessors in early personal computers were so underpowered and insufficient for graphics work that attached laser printers usually had more onboard processing power. Memory prices later decreased significantly, while rapid improvements in the performance of PCs and peripheral cables (most importantly, SCSI ) enabled
4104-469: The HP 9100A in 1968, and old-line calculator companies such as Monroe and Marchant . Wang calculators were at first sold to scientists and engineers, but the company later became established in financial services industries, which had relied on complicated printed tables for mortgages and annuities. In 1971, Wang believed that calculators would become unprofitable low-margin commodities and decided to leave
4218-527: The HP LaserJet , was released; it used the Canon CX engine, controlled by HP software. The LaserJet was quickly followed by printers from Brother Industries , IBM , and others. First-generation machines had large photosensitive drums, of circumference greater than the loaded paper's length. Once faster-recovery coatings were developed, the drums could touch the paper multiple times in a pass, and therefore be smaller in diameter. A year later, Apple introduced
4332-530: The IBM 4214 based on a modified PS350. In 1985, company revenues were $ 126 million with $ 65 million from IBM 4214 production. In 1986 the IBM 4214 production ended and revenue dropped. On June 23, 1986, Centronics announced the new corporate logo. The new logo never gained recognition before the sale to GENICOM, and GENICOM used the old logo in continued sales of printers and supplies. The only Centronics laser product
4446-420: The IBM 3800 , was released. It was designed for data centers , where it replaced line printers attached to mainframe computers . The IBM 3800 was used for high-volume printing on continuous stationery , and achieved speeds of 215 pages per minute (ppm), at a resolution of 240 dots per inch (dpi). Over 8,000 of these printers were sold. Soon after, in 1977, the Xerox 9700 was brought to market. Unlike
4560-542: The IBM 6670 Information Distributor as "closer to the standard envisioned". Wang's first computer, the Wang 3300, was an 8-bit integrated circuit general-purpose minicomputer designed to be the central processor for a multi-terminal time-sharing system . Byte-oriented, it also provided a number of double-byte operand memory commands. Core memory ranged from 4,096 to 65,536 bytes in 4,096-byte increments. Development began after hiring Rick Bensene in June 1968. The product
4674-495: The LaserWriter (also based on the Canon CX engine), but used the newly released PostScript page-description language (up until this point, each manufacturer used its own proprietary page-description language, making the supporting software complex and expensive). PostScript allowed the use of text, fonts, graphics, images, and color largely independent of the printer's brand or resolution. PageMaker , developed by Aldus for
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4788-584: The Xerox Star 8010, reached market. The system used a desktop metaphor that was unsurpassed in commercial sales, until the Apple Macintosh . Although it was innovative, the Star workstation was a prohibitively expensive ( US$ 17,000 ) system, affordable only to a fraction of the businesses and institutions at which it was targeted. Later, in 1984, the first laser printer intended for mass-market sales,
4902-585: The " Centronics connector ", used in other computer hardware applications, notably as the printer end of the once ubiquitous parallel-printer cable. Wang Laboratories Wang Laboratories, Inc. , was an American computer company founded in 1951 by An Wang and G. Y. Chu. The company was successively headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1954–1963), Tewksbury, Massachusetts (1963–1976), and finally in Lowell, Massachusetts (1976–1997). At its peak in
5016-450: The 1200 typewriter's "print" mode. The stored text could also be edited using keys on a simple, six-key array. Basic editing functions included Insert, Delete, Skip (character, line), and so on. The labor and cost savings of this device were immediate and remarkable: pages of text no longer had to be retyped to correct simple errors, and projects could be worked on, stored, and then retrieved for use later on. The rudimentary Wang 1200 machine
5130-775: The 1980s, Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of US$ 3 billion and employed over 33,000 people. It was one of the leading companies during the time of the Massachusetts Miracle . The company was directed by An Wang, who was described as an "indispensable leader" and played a personal role in setting business and product strategy until his death in 1990. The company went through transitions between different product lines, beginning with typesetters, calculators, and word processors, then adding computers, copiers, and laser printers. Wang Laboratories filed for bankruptcy protection in August 1992. After emerging from bankruptcy,
5244-399: The 1990s to receive mainframe reports and make them viewable online by executives. At Mellon Mortgage , 18 VS systems from the smallest to the largest were used as the enterprise mortgage origination, servicing, finance, documentation, hedge system and mainframe gateway services (for login and printing). Between Mellon Mortgage and parent Mellon Bank, their network contained 45 VS systems and
5358-406: The 2200 CS, after which Wang did not develop or market any new 2200 products. In 1997, Wang reported having about two hundred 2200 systems still under maintenance around the world. Throughout, Wang had always offered maintenance services for the 2200. The 2200 BASIC-2 language was ported to be compiled and run on non-Wang hardware and operating systems by at least two companies. Niakwa Inc created
5472-503: The Bank portion of the network supported about 16,000 Wang Office users for email, report distribution, and scheduling. At Kent and KTec Electronics, two related Houston companies, separate VS clusters were the enterprise systems, handling distribution, manufacturing, and accounting, with significant EDI capability for receiving customer forecasts, sending invoices, sending purchase orders, and receiving shipping notifications. Both systems ran
5586-510: The DP capabilities of the VS. In many instances, the VS ran smaller enterprises up to about $ 500 million / year and, in larger organizations, found use as a gateway to larger corporate mainframes, handling workstation pass-through and massive print services. At Exxon Corporation , for instance, thirteen 1985 top-of-the-line VS300s at the Houston headquarters were used in the 1980s and into
5700-461: The E Series 900 and 1200 LPM band printers. In 1982, Control Data Corporation merged their current printer business unit, CPI , into Centronics and at the same time invested $ 25 million in the company, effectively taking control from Howard. During 1980-1985 the company lost $ 80 million. Control Data controlled the company until 1986 when CDC's interest was acquired by a group of investors affiliated with Drexel Burnham Lambert . The Drexel interest
5814-680: The GEISCO EDI package. Kent, which grew to $ 600 million/year , ran the Arcus distribution software in COBOL and KTec, which grew to $ 250 million/year , ran the CAELUS MRP system for manufacturing in BASIC. In the late 1980s, a British television documentary accused the company of targeting a competitor, Canadian company AES Wordplex , in an attempt to take it out of the market. However,
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#17327733736765928-521: The IBM 3800, the Xerox 9700 was not targeted to replace any particular existing printers; however, it did have limited support for the loading of fonts . The Xerox 9700 excelled at printing high-value documents on cut-sheet paper with varying content (e.g. insurance policies). Inspired by the Xerox 9700's commercial success, Japanese camera and optics company Canon developed in 1979 the Canon LBP-10,
6042-611: The Macintosh and LaserWriter, was also released in 1985 and the combination became very popular for desktop publishing . Laser printers brought exceptionally fast and high-quality text printing in multiple fonts on a page, to the business and home markets. No other commonly available printer during this era could also offer this combination of features. A laser beam projects an image of the page to be printed onto an electrically charged, photoconductive , rotating, cylindrical drum. Photoconductivity conducts charged electrons away from
6156-473: The Mini-Printer Model 770 was introduced—a small, low-cost desktop serial matrix printer. This was the first printer built completely in-house, and there were problems. Flaws in the microprocessor led to a recall and a stoppage of manufacturing for a year. During this period, Epson , Brother and others began to gain market share and Centronics never recovered. 1980 also saw the introduction of
6270-610: The OIS word processing and list processing packages. The system was Tempest certified , leading to global deployment in American embassies after the Iran hostage crisis. The Z80 platform on which Alliance ran forced it to remain as an 8-bit application in a 64 KB workstation. The first Wang VS computer was introduced in 1977, the same year as Digital Equipment Corporation 's VAX ; both continued for decades. The VS instruction set
6384-605: The United Kingdom, it was selected for the DTI Office Automation pilot schemes at the National Coal Board in about 1980. Wang, which had added DVX Message Waiting in 1984, named their 1989 announcement DVX II. Internal research on speech recognition was carried out and implemented for discrete word recognition but was never released to the field. At one point there were 50 members of
6498-627: The VS integrated development environment included Assembler , COBOL 74, COBOL 85, BASIC, Ada , RPG II , C, PL/I , FORTRAN , Glossary, MABASIC, SPEED II, and Procedure (a scripting language). Pascal was also supported for I/O co-processor development. The Wang PACE (Professional Application Creation Environment) 4GL and database was used from the mid-1980s onward by customers and third-party developers to build complex applications, sometimes involving many thousands of screens, hundreds of distinct application modules, and serving many hundreds of users. Substantial vertical applications were developed for
6612-550: The VS took hold, the word processor and OIS lines were phased out. The word processing software continued, in the form of a loadable- microcode environment that allowed VS workstations to take on the behavior of traditional Wang WP terminals to operate with the VS and use it as a document server . Wang made inroads into IBM and DEC markets in the 1980s, but did not have a serious impact on IBM's mainframe market due to self-limiting factors. Even though An Wang wanted to compete with IBM, too many Wang salespeople weren't trained enough on
6726-624: The Voice Engineering Department. Lawrence E. Bergeron was instrumental in managing the Voice Engineering Department at Wang Labs. He promoted the purchase of a VAX-11/780 for 'real-time' signal processing research and created the Peripheral Signal Processor board (PSP). The PSP was placed into 16 racks to handle 128 phone lines for the DVX (Digital Voice Exchange). Wang's Digital Voice Exchange supported
6840-615: The Wang 2200T and created a computer they named the Iskra 226 . The "COCOM restrictions" theory, though, while popular in the West, is challenged by some Russian computer historians on the basis that development for the Iskra-226 started in 1978, two years before the Afghan war. It is also different from the Wang 2200 in its internals, being more inspired by it rather than a direct clone. It used
6954-475: The Wang 500 rewrote the microcode to perform word processing functions instead of numerical calculations. The operator of a Wang 1200 typed text on a conventional IBM Selectric keyboard; when the Return key was pressed, the line of text was stored on a cassette tape. One cassette held roughly 20 pages of text and could be "played back" (e.g., the text retrieved) by printing the contents on continuous-form paper in
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#17327733736767068-512: The Wang VS by third-party software houses throughout the 1980s in COBOL, PACE, BASIC, PL/I, and RPG II. The Wang OFFICE family of applications and Wang WP were both popular applications on the VS. Word Processing ran on the VS through services that emulated the OIS environment and downloaded the WP software as "microcode" (in Wang terminology) to VS workstations. The press and the industry referred to
7182-410: The Wang family would retain control of the company even after going public. He created a second class of stock, class B, with higher dividends but only one-tenth the voting power of class C. The public mostly bought class B shares; the Wang family retained most of the class C shares. The letters B and C were used to ensure that brokerages would fill any Wang stock orders with class B shares unless class C
7296-416: The areas exposed to laser light. Powdered ink ( toner ) particles are then electrostatically attracted to remaining areas of the drum that have not been laser-beamed. The drum then transfers the image onto paper which is passed through the machine by direct contact. Finally, the paper is passed onto a finisher, which uses heat to instantly fuse the toner that represents the image onto the paper. The laser
7410-413: The backside of the paper to help pull the negatively charged toner from the photoreceptor drum to the paper. The paper passes through rollers in the fuser assembly, where temperatures up to 427 °C (801 °F) and pressure are used to permanently bond the toner to the paper. One roller is usually a hollow tube (heat roller) and the other is a rubber-backed roller (pressure roller). A radiant heat lamp
7524-410: The blade allows too much toner to remain on the developer roll, the toner particles might come loose as the roll turns, precipitate onto the paper below, and become bonded to the paper during the fusing process. This will result in a general darkening of the printed page in broad vertical stripes with very soft edges. If the fuser roller does not reach a high enough temperature or if the ambient humidity
7638-429: The calculator business within a few years. Wang's first attempt at a word processor was the Wang 1200, announced in late 1971 but not available until 1972. The design consisted of the logic of a Wang 500 calculator hooked up to an OEM-manufactured IBM Selectric typewriter for keying and printing, and dual cassette decks for storage. Harold Koplow , who had written the microcode for the Wang 700 and its derivative
7752-423: The class of machines made by Wang, including the VS, as "minicomputers," and Kenney's 1992 book refers to the VS line as "minicomputers" throughout. Although some argue that the high-end VS machines and their successors should qualify as mainframes , Wang avoided this term. In his autobiography, An Wang, rather than calling the VS 300 a mainframe, said that it "verges on mainframe performance." He went on to draw
7866-640: The company changed its name to Wang Global . It was acquired by Getronics of the Netherlands in 1999, becoming Getronics North America, then was sold to KPN in 2007 and CompuCom in 2008. Wang went public on August 26, 1967, with the issuance of 240,000 shares at $ 12.50 per share on the American Stock Exchange . The stock closed the day above $ 40, valuing the company's equity at approximately $ 77 million, of which An Wang and his family owned about 63%. An Wang took steps to ensure that
7980-499: The corporate data-processing decision-makers. The chapter in Wang's book dealing with them shows that he saw them as "a beachhead in the Fortune 1000." The Wang VS was Wang's entry into IT departments. In his book, An Wang notes that, to sell the VS, "we aggressively recruited salesmen with strong backgrounds in data processing ... who had experience dealing with MIS executives, and who knew their way around Fortune 1000 companies." As
8094-497: The development of low-end laser printers which offload rasterization to the sending PC. For such printers, the operating system's print spooler renders the raw bitmap of each page into the PC's system memory at the target resolution, then sends that bitmap directly to the laser (at the expense of slowing down all other programs on the sending PC). The appearance of so-called "dumb" or "host-based" laser printers from NEC made it possible for
8208-493: The distinction between the "mainframes" at the high end of IBM's line ("just as Detroit would rather sell large cars ... so IBM would rather sell mainframes")—in which IBM had a virtual monopoly—with the "mid-sized systems" in which IBM had not achieved dominance: "The minicomputer market is still healthy. This is good for the customer and good for minicomputer makers." An Wang felt a personal sense of rivalry with IBM, partly due to heavy-handed treatment by IBM in 1955 to 1956 over
8322-503: The documentary came to no conclusion regarding this. Wang's approach was called "The Gas Cooker Program," named after similar programs to give discounts on new gas stoves by trading in an old one. Wang was accused of targeting Wordplex by offering a large discount on Wang OIS systems with a trade-in of Wordplex machines, regardless of the age or condition of the trade-in machine. Based on its good reputation with users and its program of aggressive discounts, Wang gained an increasing share of
8436-422: The drum to pick up excessive toner on the next revolution from the developer roll and causing a repeated but fainter image from the previous revolution to appear down the page. If the toner doctor blade does not ensure that a smooth, even layer of toner is applied to the developer roll, the resulting printout may have white streaks from this in places where the blade has scraped off too much toner. Alternatively, if
8550-419: The drum which were struck by the laser, however, momentarily have no charge, and the toner being pressed against the drum by the toner-coated developer roll in the next step moves from the roll's rubber surface to the charged portions of the surface of the drum. Some non-laser printers ( LED printers ) use an array of light-emitting diodes spanning the width of the page to generate an image, rather than using
8664-406: The drum, causing those areas to appear as white vertical streaks. If the neutral wiper blade fails to remove residual toner from the drum's surface, that toner may circulate on the drum a second time, causing smears on the printed page with each revolution. If the charge roller becomes damaged or does not have enough power, it may fail to adequately negatively charge the surface of the drum, allowing
8778-489: The early 1980s. Overshadowed by the Wang VS, the 2200 languished as a cost-effective but forgotten solution in the hands of the customers who had it. In the late 1980s, Wang revisited the 2200 series one last time, offering 2200 customers a new 2200 CS with bundled maintenance for less than customers were paying at the time just for maintenance of their aging 2200s. The 2200 CS had an Intel 386 processor , updated disk units, and other peripherals. Most 2200 customers upgraded to
8892-439: The four colors. Color printing adds complexity to the printing process because very slight misalignments known as registration errors can occur between printing each color, causing unintended color fringing, blurring, or light/dark streaking along the edges of colored regions. To permit a high registration accuracy, some color laser printers use a large rotating belt called a "transfer belt". The transfer belt passes in front of all
9006-526: The hardware component was made of two large add-in boards called the WLOC (Wang Local Office Connection). It contained a Z-80 processor and 64 KB of memory. The original PC-VS hardware used the 928 terminal emulator board; the WLOC boards were used in the subsequent 80286 machines. Laser printer Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process. It produces high-quality text and graphics (and moderate-quality photographs) by repeatedly passing
9120-407: The late 1990s, monochrome laser printers had become inexpensive enough for home-office use, having displaced other printing technologies, although color inkjet printers (see below) still had advantages in photo quality reproduction. As of 2016 , low-end monochrome laser printers can sell for less than $ 75, and while these printers tend to lack onboard processing and rely on the host computer to generate
9234-403: The latter, the image is formed by reflecting light off an existing document onto the exposed drum. The laser printer was invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970s. Laser printers were introduced for the office and then home markets in subsequent years by IBM , Canon , Xerox, Apple , Hewlett-Packard and many others. Over the decades, quality and speed have increased as prices have decreased, and
9348-427: The manual and convinced An Wang to turn it into a real project. The word processing machine – the Wang 1200 WPS – was introduced in June 1976 and was an instant success, as was its successor, the 1977 Wang OIS (Office Information System). The OIS was a multi-user system. Each workstation looked like a typical terminal but contained its own Intel 8080 microprocessor (later versions used
9462-527: The once cutting-edge printing devices are now ubiquitous. In the 1960s, the Xerox Corporation held a dominant position in the photocopier market. In 1969, Gary Starkweather , who worked in Xerox's product development department, had the idea of using a laser beam to "draw" an image of what was to be copied directly onto the copier drum. After transferring to the recently formed Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) in 1971, Starkweather adapted
9576-558: The original specifications in terms of either tendency to accept a negative charge, to move to the discharged areas of the photoreceptor drum from the developer roll, to fuse appropriately to the paper, or to come off the drum cleanly in each revolution. As with most electronic devices, the cost of laser printers has decreased significantly over the years. In 1984, the HP LaserJet sold for $ 3500, had trouble with even small, low-resolution graphics, and weighed 32 kg (71 lb). By
9690-411: The page description into a bitmap which is stored in the printer's raster memory. Each horizontal strip of dots across the page is known as a raster line or scan line . Laser printing differs from other printing technologies in that each page is always rendered in a single continuous process without any pausing in the middle, while other technologies like inkjet can pause every few lines. To avoid
9804-416: The paper passes through the fuser assembly, the particles of toner melt. The paper may or may not be oppositely charged. The fuser can be an infrared oven, a heated pressure roller, or (on some very fast, expensive printers) a xenon flash lamp . The warmup process that a laser printer goes through when power is initially applied to the printer consists mainly of heating the fuser element. The mechanism inside
9918-402: The photoreceptor drum and deposits it into a waste reservoir. A charge roller then re-establishes a uniform negative charge on the surface of the now-clean drum, readying it to be struck again by the laser. Once the raster image generation is complete, all steps of the printing process can occur one after the other in rapid succession. This permits the use of a very small and compact unit, where
10032-419: The photoreceptor is charged, rotates a few degrees and is scanned, rotates a few more degrees, and is developed, and so forth. The entire process can be completed before the drum completes one revolution. Different printers implement these steps in distinct ways. LED printers use a linear array of light-emitting diodes to "write" the light on the drum. The toner is based on either wax or plastic, so that when
10146-710: The printers were assembled in New Hampshire. In the 1970s, Centronics formed a relationship with Canon to develop non-impact printers. No products were ever produced, but Canon continued to work on laser printers, eventually developing a highly successful series of engines. In 1977, Centronics sued competitor Mannesmann AG in a patent dispute regarding the return spring used in the print actuator. In 1975, Centronics formed an OEM agreement with Tandy and produced DMP and LP series printers for several years. The 6000 series band printers were introduced in 1978. By 1979 company revenues were over $ 100 million. In 1980,
10260-447: The product that made computers popularly accessible." In Koplow's words, "Dr. Wang kicked me out of marketing. I, along with Dave Moros, was relegated to Long Range Planning – 'LRPed'. This ... was tantamount to being fired: 'here is a temporary job until you find another one in some other company.'" Although he and Moros perceived the assignment to design a word processing machine as busywork, they went ahead anyway. They wrote
10374-541: The release of the 2200 PCS (Personal Computer System) and 2200 PCS-II models in 1976, the history of computing regards the earliest PC as one which contained a microprocessor , which the 2200 PCS did not. However, the self-contained PCS-II incorporated many of the innovations that would later be seen in PCs, including the first 5.25-inch floppy drives that were designed for the PCS-II by Shugart Associates . The original Wang PC
10488-425: The renting of voice mailboxes. Voice prompts were created by a hired voice specialist to give a melodic presentation for the DVX. To avoid false triggering of touch-tones by the prompts (due to input/output cross talk), notch filters were created to remove the touch tone frequencies from the prompts. Prompt languages supported included German, Spanish, French, British English, American English, and Portuguese. Despite
10602-492: The retail cost of low-end 300-dpi laser printers to decrease to as low as US$ 700 by early 1994 and US$ 600 by early 1995. In September 1997, HP introduced the host-based LaserJet 6L, which could print 600 dpi text at up to six pages per minute for only US$ 400. 1200 dpi printers have been widely available in the home market since 2008. 2400 dpi electrophotographic printing plate makers, essentially laser printers that print on plastic sheets, are also available. In older printers,
10716-508: The rights to his magnetic-core patents (this encounter formed the subject of a long chapter in Wang's own book, Lessons ). According to Charles C. Kenney, " Jack Connors remembers being in Wang's office one day when the Doctor pulled out a chart on which he had plotted Wang's growth and projected that Wang Laboratories would overtake IBM sometime in the middle of the 1990s. 'He had kept it a long time,' says Connors. 'And he believed it.'" Wang
10830-564: The same BASIC language (named T-BASIC) with a few enhancements. Many research papers reference calculations done on the Iskra 226. The machine's designers were nominated for a 1985 State Prize. Later, a somewhat scaled-down Unix implementation was created for Iskra-226, which was used in the Soviet Union . Wang had a line called Alliance, which was based on the high-end OIS (140/145) hardware architecture. It had more powerful software than
10944-413: The sweep, and the angle of sweep is canted very slightly to compensate for this motion. The stream of rasterized data held in the printer's memory rapidly turns the laser on and off as it sweeps. The laser beam neutralizes (or reverses) the charge on the surface of the drum, leaving a static electric negative image on the drum's surface which will repel the negatively charged toner particles. The areas on
11058-486: The toner cartridges and each of the toner layers are precisely applied to the belt. The combined layers are then applied to the paper in a uniform single step. Color printers usually have a higher cost per page than monochrome printers, even if printing monochrome-only pages. Liquid electrophotography (LEP) is a similar process used in HP Indigo presses that uses electrostatically charged ink instead of toner, and using
11172-530: The unique imaging process. Manufacturers use a similar business model for both low-cost color laser printers and inkjet printers : the printers are sold cheaply while replacement toners and inks are relatively expensive. A color laser printer's average running cost per page is usually slightly less, even though both the laser printer and laser toner cartridge have higher upfront prices, as laser toner cartridges print many more sheets relative to their cost than inkjet cartridges. The print quality of color lasers
11286-480: The workplace. The software can be used to set rules dictating how employees interact with printers, such as setting limits on how many pages can be printed per day, limiting usage of color ink, and flagging jobs that appear to be wasteful. Color laser printers use colored toner (dry ink), typically cyan , magenta , yellow , and black ( CMYK ). While monochrome printers only use one laser scanner assembly, color printers often have two or more, often one for each of
11400-440: Was a single-user system. The improved VP model increased performance more than tenfold and enhanced the language (renamed BASIC-2 ). The 2200 VP evolved into a desktop computer and larger MVP system to support up to 16 workstations and utilized commercial disk technologies that appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The disk subsystems could be attached to up to 15 computers giving a theoretical upper limit of 240 workstations in
11514-532: Was a well-regarded calculator company. The dollar price of Wang calculators was in the mid-four-figures. They used Nixie tube readouts, performed transcendental functions , had varying degrees of programmability , and used magnetic core memory . The 200 and 300 calculator models were available as time-shared simultaneous (SE) packages that had a central processing unit the size of a small suitcase connected by cables leading to four individual desktop display/keyboard units. Competition included HP , which introduced
11628-558: Was acquired by Centronics in 1987. The LineWriter 400 band printer was introduced in 1983, closely followed by the faster LineWriter 800 band printer in 1984. The LineWriter series would continue through 1995. The GLP (Great Little Printer) was a series of low-end serial matrix printers introduced in 1984. The relationship with Brother continued with several of the PrintStation models being produced from rebadged Brother products. Exclusive rights to market Trilog color matrix printers
11742-455: Was acquired in 1984, and Trilog was purchased outright in 1985. Advanced Terminals (a manufacturer of sheet feeders) and BDS Computer Australia Pty Ltd were purchased in 1986. The PrintStation 350 series serial matrix printer was highly successful in the OEM market, sold with the logos of Data General , ITT Courier, NCR , CDC , Decision Data and ISI. Most profitable was the agreement to build
11856-467: Was announced in February 1969 and shipped to its first customer on March 29, 1971. Wang developed and marketed several lines of small computer systems for both word processing and data processing. Instead of a clear, linear progression, the product lines overlapped and, in some cases, borrowed technology from each other. The most identifiable Wang minicomputer performing recognizable data processing
11970-553: Was compatible with the IBM System/360 series, but it did not run any System/360 system software. The VS operating system and all system software were built from the ground up to support interactive users as well as batch operations. The VS was aimed at the business data processing market in general and IBM in particular. While many programming languages were available, the VS was programmed in COBOL . Other languages supported in
12084-516: Was developed under contract to phototypesetter manufacturer Compugraphic , which retained the manufacturing rights of the Linasec. The success of the machine led Compugraphic to decide to manufacture it themselves, causing Wang to lose out on a million dollars in revenue. The Wang LOCI-2 (Logarithmic Computing Instrument) desktop calculator (the earlier LOCI-1 in September 1964 was not
12198-584: Was formed as a corporation in Hudson, New Hampshire with Howard as president and chairman. The Centronics Model 101 was introduced at the 1970 National Computer Conference in May. The print head used an innovative seven-wire solenoid impact system. Based on this design, Centronics later developed the first dot matrix impact printer (while the first such printer was the OKI Wiredot in 1968). Howard developed
12312-615: Was one of the first computer companies to advertise on television and the first to run an ad during the Super Bowl in 1978. Their first ad literally cast Wang Laboratories as David and IBM as Goliath, several years before the famous 1984 Apple Computer ad. A later ad depicted Wang Laboratories as a helicopter gunship taking aim at IBM. Wang wanted to compete against IBM as a computer company, selling to management information system departments. The calculators, word processing systems, and OIS were sold into individual departments, bypassing
12426-584: Was released in April 1982 to counter the IBM PC, which had been released the previous August and which had gained wide acceptance in the market for which Wang traditionally positioned the OIS system. It was based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor, a faster CPU than the IBM PC's 8088. A hardware/software package that permitted the Wang PC to act as a terminal to the OIS and VS products was available. The first version of
12540-596: Was released in July 1986: the PagePrinter 8. The PP8 used a Sharp engine identical to an existing Sharp copier, using a 6800 based controller jointly developed by Sharp and Centronics. At $ 2,495, the PP8 was $ 500 less than the HP LaserJet . A faster version was announced, but never materialized. In 1987 the Centronics printer business was sold to GENICOM for $ 87 million. Centronics Data Computer Corporation continued as
12654-594: Was specifically requested. Wang stock had been listed on the New York Stock Exchange , but this maneuver was not quite acceptable under NYSE's rules, and Wang was forced to delist with NYSE and relist on the more liberal American Stock Exchange . After Wang's 1992 bankruptcy, holders of class B and C common stock were treated the same. The company's first major project was the Linasec in 1964, an electronic special-purpose computer designed to justify paper tape for use on automated Linotype machines . It
12768-431: Was surprised at the success of this machine in the UK, but could not supply a spell-check programme in time before the PC. The PC, with its flexibility of combining word processors with other programs such as spreadsheets, had rendered such a specific-task machine unsellable. The Wang Office Assistant had a short life span of four years. The Wang DVX was one of the first integrated switchboard and voicemail systems. In
12882-462: Was the Wang 2200 , which appeared in May 1973. Unlike some other desktop computers such as the HP 9830 , it had a CRT in a cabinet that also included an integrated computer-controlled compact cassette storage unit and keyboard. It was microcoded to run interpreted Wang BASIC . It was widely used in small- and medium-sized businesses worldwide; about 65,000 systems were shipped. The original 2200
12996-541: Was the precursor of the Wang Office Information System (OIS), which revolutionized the way typing projects were performed in the American workplace. Following the Wang 1200, Harold Koplow and David Moros made another attempt at designing a word processor. They started by first writing the user's manual for the product. A 2002 Boston Globe article refers to Koplow as a "wisecracking rebel" who "was waiting for dismissal when, in 1975, he developed
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