Two little quirky sidebars on the unholy alliance between Wang Laboratories Inc and IBM Corp which explain why fans of the Wang VS describe it as the AS/400 but 10 years ahead of its time: apart from the fact that the VS has a tightly integrated database management system, it also implements the IBM 370 instruction set; also, in the heyday of the machine, its screen-based development environment was so highly regarded for writing Cobol applications that Wang found 370 users were developing their applications on the VS and laboriously moving them over – we try to discourage people from doing that because the two Cobols aren’t 100% compatible, Wang folk used to say.
