Wang 600, 700 and 720B programmable calculators

UvA Computer Museum catalogue nrs 99.13, 01.13 and 02.63

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The Wang 600 Programmable Calculating System (1972; shown in the picture), has the common functions including the inverse trigonometric functions and can be programmed in up to 1848 steps, depending on the amount of memory. Additional functions (for statistical computations, for instance) can be added by plugging in ROM units. Any group of 8 program steps can be converted to a storage register holding a 10-digit floating point number. An optional cassette tape unit can hold 1848 program steps or 2772 numbers per side. The machine has a neon tube display and a built-in impact printer.
The machine in our collection has three tape drives (two in a separate unit, model 629) and an extended memory box with 512 storage registers (model 601). Also we have the model 602 Plotting Output Writer (which looks very much like a modified IBM Selectric typewriter).
The Wang 600 is a later, less expensive relative of the Wang 700 series of calculators. Besides other differences, it uses solid-state memory instead of the core memory of the 700 series.
For an extensive description of models 600, 700 and 720, we refer to the website of the Old Calculator Museum.

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The Wang 600 was donated by Mr. Johan Dragt, who used it at the Statistics Department of the city of Utrecht. Our Wang 700 was used at the University's Chemistry Department. The Wang 720B was donated by Mr. H. Balke, who bought the machine in 1974 for his private building company, paying Dfl 60,000 (about $ 20,000 at the exchange rate of the time).