image of READY prompt

Wang2200.org

January 3, 2022

This is a must watch. Bernardo Kastrup of The Byte Attic youtube channel did an absolutely stunning job of restoring a Wang PCS to good-as-new working condition.

June 19, 2021

The tech page has a new section containing EPROM images from 17 different boards. There are plenty of missing EPROM images simply because I don't have them all. But if it is there it might be enough to revive a broken board.

May 18, 2021

Just a short update. Zdeněk Houška has restored a 2200 LVP to fully functioning condition and has done some first rate hacking to allow import/export of disk images from a host computer to the LVP. He has made a great video documenting the system.

December 27, 2020

It has been a long slog, but I've finally made it through the process of capturing hundreds of floppy disk images, inspecting all of them to get an idea of what is on them, then the hard part of deciding how to organize them and what to keep. Some disks are simple, eg, a diagnostics disk for the 2229 peripheral card. Others are complicated because there are many variations of the same disk, each having some files that the others don't. Some were buggy pre-release tests disks of various versions of the operating system, some contained code from customers who were having problems. I have retained all of the disk images, of course, but only the clearly unique and interesting disks are logged.

While creating this update, I realize there was a big in my website-building script which has existed for years. When the website is built, a simple database of all the raw disk images is consulted, and it indicates which disk images should be presented, what category it is (games, os, utility, etc), what name it should be called, and whether it should be zipped. The bug was that a source file called disk08.wvd was specified to be named more_games.wvd and zipped, the script would indeed produce more_games.wvd.zip, but the file inside it was still called disk08.wvd. That has now been corrected such that there is a consistent name for the zip file and the file name inside it.

August 25, 2020

Just a small update. I was going through the boxes of stuff Mike Bahia sent a few years ago and took inventory of the tape drives and spare tapes he sent, and updated the spares page with that information. If you have a system that could use some of this, let me know.

August 15, 2020

Timothy Colegrove made a couple of contributions to the website:

The latter was done with the help of Philip Lord. Those two links are also available from the tech page. Thanks, guys!

July 25, 2020

I thought I had already scanned the documents that Mike Bahia sent my way. However, while digging around one of my boxes, I found a notebook that had escaped my attention. Those have been scanned and put online.

June 28, 2020

A lot more documentation about the Iskra-226 family has been provided by an anonymous benefactor. In a few cases I've removed the non-Iskra-226 parts of those documents, and in some cases I OCR'd it and fed it through machine translation to get a rough version in English. Visit the "books" section of the Iskra-226 page to find it all.

June 20, 2020

The site has been updated Here are some more manuals and at a number of manuals and images of the Iskra-226.

March 8, 2020

This is a particularly satisfying note to write. It has taken a few years to find the time, but I've finally organized and shared the Wang R&D disk images Mike sent. There were hundreds of files to examine/understand/classify, but now it is nearly all online, in the 2200 Technical archive.

That page contains zip files for each disk platter image, along with the notes I gathered for each of the files on the disks. However, because there were probably more than 1000 files total, many got just a cursory scan, so there may still be hidden gems to be found.

The biggest news is there is now a virtual disk image containing the source code for MVP Release 3.5, along with the tools necessary to build a bootable binary image identical to the official release, along with notes about how to do it.

That page also contains other interesting source code, including the microcode for the CPU boot ROMs, the microcode for the MVP interactive boot menu, source code for the 2236 character generator and keyboard mapping ROMs, and source for the 2436 intelligent terminal's Z80 processor.

Completely unrelated to this, I've added a (M)VP $GIO hack to the Stupid Tricks page.

February 2, 2020

This is a tiny update, but it is a pretty unique document. Wang, of course, had extensive documentation for their hardware and software products. But recently this came up on eBay and I grabbed it. It is a brief, 8 page, instruction manual for the StarTrek computer game. It apparently really was released by Wang, though it seems like it came out of their British office. There is no date printed on it, nor an official Wang document number, but I'd guess is is from the mid 70s. Keep in mind there are many versions of Star Trek for the Wang 2200; this is just one.

January 26, 2020

I've been sitting on a number of virtual disk images that I captured a long time ago but didn't release until now. Part of the delay was that it takes time to go through all the disks and figure out what can be shared, what is a duplicate of something else, organizing and adding descriptions in some cases. Because of all the work the past few years on scanning then updating the emulator, I put organizing the disks on a lower priority.

The other part of the delay was that I kind of forgot about them. Some of them were captured 8 years ago. :-(

There are still more images that I need to work through. But I'm working on them.

Here is a link to each disk image, but it would be more informative to go to the virtual disk image archive and find the entry there (though the last two are on the 2200 technology page). In addition to the description, you can link on any disk image and see the disk contents.

January 4, 2020

Sorry for making you wait, but Wangemu 3.0 is now released. For many years I was simply busy working on other projects, including scanning and organizing a massive trove of Wang documents provided by Mike Bahia. In 2018 I started working in earnest again on the emulator, adding support for the 2236MXD terminal mux and the 2336 intelligent serial terminal. This means the emulator can now run MVP OS's. Be sure to also check out the disk image with the never released version of Wang BASIC-3 / COBOL.

It was read to go in April 2019, but I decided to add one more feature... but then other things took all time time, so I have decided to release the emulator as it is. That new feature will appear in release 3.1, hopefully before 2031.