Does anyone still use this crap besides my agency? It says right on the PrimaryMenu: Copyright 1985. 1985!! Does it make sense to buy new hardware every few years and spend countless hours trying to reconfigure the ancient software to work on it? And waste countless manhours as we sit here twiddling our thumbs waiting for it to come back online after it crashes AGAIN?? It’s written in COBOL, for Bob’s sake! It thought COBOL was outdated when we discussed it briefly in high school 10 years ago!!
COBOL!
Copyright 1985!!
GAK!!!
Wait, the Wang is back up, I’d better get some work done before it goes down again.
Daaayum. I thought the HP3000 MC used until '95 was old.
Thought about getting a Antique license plate for that thing? Put it on there, maybe someone will get a hint.
If you mean the stuff put out by the Wang government services or whateverthefucktheycallthemselves, I have two friends who work there. They program in COBOL, among other things.
Iam, I’m not sure what you mean. I work for the State of Oregon, and our agency, the Department of Consumer and Business Services, still uses Wang. They tried to do some kind of an update here a couple weeks ago and since then the Wang has crashed almost every day. I know other state agencies don’t use Wang, so I just don’t understand why ours does. I mean, we’ve got Windows 95 (yeah, not 98) on new Gateway computers, so why do we still torture ourselves with this stuff? Are we waiting until COBOL programmers become completely extinct before bothering to update?
You mean, besides cause unending torment? grumble grumble
It’s our database. It stores all the info on workers’ compensation claims, employers, and insurers, it generates follow-up reports and labels; I guess it’s just an ordinary data entry type program. Except that it’s so freaking unstable!!
I just needed to vent my spleen a little. I can’t be the only one – Does anyone else work with Wang and/or any other pathetically outdated software? Do you want to share your tales of woe?
(At least we have “real” computers now and not those damn Wang terminals; but, again, what’s the point of updating the hardware and then having to jury rig the software to work with it? Does this really save the tax payers money???)
Ah, Wang, now there’s a name that takes me back…I actuall thought they were dead by now, or out of business, or something.
In 1981 I paid $150 to take a 1-week word processing course at a storefront “pay us $150 and we will teach you word processing in one week” place. This was for the purposes of looking good on my secretarial resume. So I paid my money, waded through the Wang user’s manual (it was a self-taught course), learned to speak knowledgeably of “floppy disks” (which at the time really were floppy), and was outta there by Thursday. It looked great on my resume (“experienced word processor”) and I got a great job with it, which turned out to include figuring out how to use an Apple II word processor (it was brand-new and nobody else in the office had a clue).
I remembered thinking at the time that the Wang had a better user’s manual, but the word processing software was overly complicated–you had to memorize all sorts of combinations of how to do things (“Find and Replace”, “Global Find and Replace”, or maybe just plain “Global Replace”).
The Apple had an infuriating manual (they didn’t tell you ANYTHING), but the word processing software itself was much simpler, more intuitive.
So I suppose this is why Apple is still around and Wang, to all intents and purposes, isn’t. Except, of course, in Oregon.
We quit using the Wang WP in 1995 when we got PCs. But the data entry isn’t going away, at least not in the foreseeable future
I’d thought Wang had gone out of business, too, but according to our latest “Wang update” e-mail, our gurus are working with Wang/Getronics to fix the problem. So I wonder if this “Getronics” has taken over the Wang company or if they’ve just cornered the market on Wang fixes.
