
Wang Labs' New Freestyle Just May Suit Your Work Style (1989) - ohjeez
https://www.deseret.com/1989/5/28/18808963/wang-labs-new-freestyle-just-may-suit-your-work-style
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AlbertoGP
Here is a video showing freehand annotations with voice recording on a
spreadsheet:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRKzmFH7-cM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRKzmFH7-cM)

~~~
continuations
This in 1989? It seems the product was way ahead of its time.

So why did the product (and the company) fail?

~~~
cbm-vic-20
Dr. An Wang designated that his son to run the company when he (Dr. Wang)
died. His son was a terrible businessman, and quickly drove the company into
the ground. This was right around the time that most other computer companies
in the 495 and 128 belts around Boston died off, as speculators moved on to
the California/SV gold rush.

~~~
wenc
Wikipedia has the story

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories#Decline_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories#Decline_and_fall)

~~~
howard941
Thanks. Had a handy link to a site with an image of the veritable 2200
[http://wang2200.org/](http://wang2200.org/)

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chrisbennet
My wife and I worked on this product!

~~~
neonate
Please say more!

~~~
chrisbennet
My wife was full time employee but I was just a contractor. I remember making
a font editor for them.

I remember the pink eraser on the back actually erased.

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ethhics
Off-topic: I really enjoy seeing online articles before 2010 or so that have
modern stylesheets. It shows that writing is timeless, and the power of
separating presentation and content.

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jsgrahamus1953
Worked on the Wang 2200 seriers (MVP, other?) in the early 80's. Stationed in
Panama and they were used at the local Army Communications Command for
telephone operations and perhaps other uses. It supported 8 users, had 64K (?)
and started with 10 MB hard drive - 5 MB fixed and 5 MB removeable. Eventually
added a 72 MB drive.

I used it to reconfigure some Army communications software. Cut my teeth on
BASIC with me, and it prepared me for full-time, non-military programming.

Good memories. Thanks.

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richthegeek
It's interesting how these trends have come and gone for the entire history of
computing.

A constant shift between "computer-origin" and "real-world origin". At first,
actual paper - you could say this is "real-world" but the interface is 99%
because of how the computer works. TTY is again 90%+. But then we start
introducing real-world components like folders, pages, and paper-based
analogues like cut+paste.

For a long time the design focus seemed "let's make this as much like the
real-world workflow, within the limits of technology". Freestyle is an
excellent example of the nadir of this: a very "real-world" interface, as much
as they could possibly do constrained by technology.

But there was a point where the limits reversed: "a computer can do this, but
we have no 'real-world' way to display it". Design hammered against this
problem culminating with the Skueomorphism of the mid 00's.

Casting off those shackles led to Flat design, but maybe that threw the baby
out with the bathwater? Without any real-world grounding a lot of the basic
affordances went with them, relying entirely on a user's previous experience
with computers. A real ouroborous :)

Maybe with "soft skueomorphism" there's a reasonable middle ground for now?

But soft skueo doesn't approach some of the great things this demo represents.

Effortless human-first HCI, enhanced by computers, while ignoring "real-world"
limitations. That's the dream.

~~~
swiley
You just need good abstractions that the user can understand. Skeuomorphism
borrows from the real world but then your abstractions are essentially random,
Unix has directories and files, smalltalk has objects etc.

Modern UIs have (?) I don’t know what the basic abstractions iOS is supposed
to have in its UI that the user is supposed to manipulate, I guess web
documents?

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omarhaneef
The best thing -- well, one of -- about HN is that people who worked on the
product or used it are around to chime in.

This article reads like an advertisement, so I would be curious to know what
it was like to actually use this thing, and what "small" features that seem
like minor details prevented this from being as successful as it sounds like
it ought to have been.

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howard941
We had a Wang 2200S in junior high school marine science class - in the 70s.
What a wonder it was! Easy to program- at least most BASIC keywords had
shortcuts on the keyboard keys, and this is in a junior high school so we're
talking self taught kids - and letter quality output to a Selectric
daisywheel. We used it for marine science projects a little bit but I think
the real reason we had it was to whet our appetite for the PDP-8A waiting for
us in the next trimester's math class.

~~~
DannyB2
In the late 1970's, high school, I used a Wang 2200, PCS I believe it was. The
BASIC was wonderful compared to anything else around (TRS-80 Level II, PET,
Apple).

Disks were an out of reach luxury at this time, but Wang's 9-track cassette
tape drive was great. Nothing like using an audio cassette recorder on
microcomputers of the era. More like using a mainframe tape drive. You could
seek for files by name. Back up or skip forward by files at a time. The
software controlled the tape drive forward and backward. The 9-track head was
across the entire tape, so you could not "flip" the cassette tape over. This
was a custom drive, NOT an audio cassette tape drive. And it ran the tape
considerably faster than audio drives.

I discovered that it was possible to use inexpensive Radio Shack C-15 tapes
(15 minute) because the tape was thick enough. This was vastly cheaper than
buying the cassette tapes sold by Wang.

For the couple years I used this in high school, I had lots of fond memories.
But soon grew out of it when I used bigger better machines and languages in
college.

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Cyder
The first PC I bought with my own money after high school was a Wand. 386/66\.
Had multimedia way before it was common.

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ngcc_hk
It is not the idea, not even working solution. iPod, phone and tablet ... have
those ...

Thanks you, Steve.

