This page is a place for the rare individual who knows of the Wang 3300 to leave comments. Share your memories below! If you'd like to share a message here, contact me at the email at the bottom of the page and I'll add it.
Comments
Willy, please email me at the contact at the bottom of the page. I'd love to hear more. You might have the only 3300 in existence!
WOW - I was SO amazed to find this site! My first computer experience was on a Wang 3300 in high school, around 1975-1977. We had 4 terminals and a whopping 16K of memory in it. When I found the emulator, loaded x42 into BC, got BASIC running and typed in a little program, it brought me right back to those days - it's the WANG 3300 that started my interesting in computers and prrogramming! So glad someone put this site (and the emulator) together! jimlaing@me.com
Willy SPREUTELS , Would you ever consider selling the 3300? If not could you send Jim Hi-Res photos of the front and rear panels so he has an accurate reference to copy?
I first learned about computers using a Wang 3300 at Rocky River High School in Ohio. We used it around '77-'79, until it was replaced with a Digital machine. We used it with half a dozen Teletype machines, and the yellow paper tape - we used to carry the tapes around in cigar boxes.
I'm sure the hardware has been gone for 30 years - the computer teacher, Mr. Evans, was continually having to send out boards to be repaired back in the 70s.
Our high school got a Wang 3300 in 1973. The Wang service technicians visited us at least every other week to attempt to fix it. I got a good look inside and was amazed to see the wire-wrap boards. It seemed like they didn't have enough confidence in the design to commit to making PC boards. I was the lucky guy who had to bootstrap, run the loader tape, and load the basic tape on one of the teletype machines every time it crashed. If I had a dime... Still, it was fun learning BASIC and getting a chance to work with a real computer back then. I spent a lot of time with that 3300 and used a chi-square program in Advanced Biology
Hi Back in 1973-1976 I did my PhD at University of New South Wales, in part using a Wang 3300. A long time ago.
I attended Rocky River High School in Rocky River, Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland) in the early 1970's and they had a Wang 3300 system which we used to learn to program on. I graduated in 1975 and was only back there once, about a year later, so I have no idea what ever became of this computer. I remember the computer instructor laboriously loading the BASIC interpreter, and I remember the "WANG 3300 BASIC READY" prompt which was displayed on the teletypes. It must have taught programming pretty well, because almost 50 years later I'm still at it. :-)
Great website, great work and great emulator! However, the latest version has a broken front panel, it seems. On Windows 10 (and also on Wine/Linux) it just shows black squares and a black circle on a white background. It seems the svg does not come up. Does it maybe need some Visual Basic Runtime installed or some such? I didnt find anything in the Readme.
Bob Beta -- the emulator works without incident on multiple Windows 10 machines I've tried it on (I tried it again just now). It is possible it is a runtime issue, but usually that manifests as a failure to run, not a failure to render. Unfortunately I have no ability to test the emulator on a wide variety of machines, and as the 3300 is so obscure, very few people have downloaded and run it, so it is not possible to puzzle out some common factor as you are a data point of one. :-(
Have a 3300 and a double mini-cassette deck. Teletype and paper tapes lost. Never used the mini-cassette unit.. 3300 unit is working excepted one of front panel lamps.