The wang calculator was hardly tiny, at least not the one I used in 1970-71. IIRC the size of a large lunchbox or maybe an attache case.
AND...it could connect to four display units, an early timesharing system. I think you could have several programs on the card and choose which program to execute from any of the 4 display units. We had one in the Freshmman physics lab at Northwestern university. I was a graduate student and in charge of a lab section. I picked up one of the card readers in a junk box at a retro computer fair, minus the electronics. I figured I could connect it to some parallel ports to read tab cards in two passes (read half the columns, reverse the card and read the others). Does anybody want a picture of it? <pre>--Carey</pre> > On 04/16/2024 4:21 PM CDT Fred Cisin via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: > > ... > > In 1970 or 1971, Wang had a tiny desktop calculator that had a card > reader! The card reader was an external peripheral, that clam-shell closed > on individual port-a-punch cards (perforated normal sized cards using > every other column) >
