planet graphic Wang VS FAQ Fodder


Last updated: 17-Jul-02 (previous update 05-Feb-96) | Visitor No. counter since 960205

Here is some stuff which, if clarified, answered, verified, could become news and/or FAQ material. Anything new or updated appears at the top.

Some questions, just off the top of my often spinning head:

Does anyone have any info about older (2-3 yrs.) Wang PC peripherals? Someone is looking for Win95 drivers for a Wang Acumos AVGA2 video card. Any info out there?

My sources tell me the VS12000 is still selling strongly, and that the [16000?] will be out late this year (1995) with a 50% increase in CPU power over the 12000/650.

It's out!

The VS16000, unveiled Oct 17 or 18 at Wang's InterAction conference in Boston. That's all I know. Specs will be posted when I get them. Second-hand info, unconfirmed, says:

2.5 to 5 times faster than 9480 at instruction level. Board swap for current systems (300, 7000, 8000, 9000, 12000). 10000 and 12550 (10000 box) will be box swaps. A program to upgrade to a 12000/650 now and get 100% credit when the 16000 is released (Q2'96). Up to 512MB of memory, 30ns cycle speed.

Wang's Resource Sharing Facility fibre link was written/designed to conform to the FDDI standard. Does anyone know of a case in which this fibre link has been delivered to a telco and moved through the telco's FDDI transport to link VS's at different locations? Going down the block or across the street with private fibre on telco poles doesn't count!
Does anyone know of any IOP and/or config and/or third party product that will allow running an async line to a printer at a rate faster than 19200?
How about being able to use an HP Laserjet on a parallel connection (PIB) and bypassing or defeating the microcode's insistence on sending a PCL RESET to the printer before each and every page?

[Note: I've solved this one. It involves minor microcode patches and judicious selection of VS font. Anyone interested should contact me.]

The problem is this: To make use of PCL's overlay macro feature, it is necessary to prime the printer with a macro and enable it for overlay. Unfortunately, when configured on a Printer Interface Box as, say, an LDP8, the Wang microcode goes to great lengths to make sure the printer conforms to the Wang printer behavior model and apparently RESETs the printer in conjunction with sending page orientation and font settings. It seems to do this before each page, probably to make very sure the user never experiences any weird behavior resulting from activation of printer options outside the Wang behavior model.

Did anyone ever make a black box to interface SMD disk controllers to SCSI disk drives? If not, why not? Maybe it's a little late to be asking the question, but this has bothered me since the late 1980's. I've seen an ad for something that looks like it might do this, but it wasn't clear.

Note: Products to adapt modern SCSI disk drives to the SMD electronics package have been offered. This is mostly irrelevant now, as any site still using SMD drives has much more serious problems than just that. Most older systems should have been replaced by VS5000/6000 by now (2002), and older disk and tape equipment by SCSI.

It's true that Wang eventually did make a SCSI controller for the CP4 machines (VS85/90/100), probably because so many VS85's were out there that Wang had little choice. The VS85 lived a lot longer than Wang probably would have liked, and was an excellent workhorse for a lot of customers.
All sorts of black-boxing has been done for IBM 3270 and the like, even for Burroughs/Unisys terminals. Has anyone found anything that can packetize a 928 connection to allow it to be routed over LANs, WANs, maybe the Internet?
Is anyone still using OS 7.32 and experiencing occasional nasty XDMS problems? How about Indexed-Plus files spontaneously corrupting? How about files that were OK as Indexed-Plus yesterday but have to be converted to ordinary Indexed to function today? I did, and if you write I'll tell you what I found out.

Note: 7.32 has been superceded by 7.4x and 7.50, but is still in use here and there for one reason or another. The official response (and not an unreasonable one) is to move up to 7.50.

What ever happened to all those Wang PC keyboards?

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