Lauren Clark
Short Bio
My name is Lauren Clark, and I am a former Wang employee from the Columbus, Ohio field office. My email address is LaurenCClark@aol.com in case anyone wants to contact me.Stories and Anecdotes
In 1980 I took a job as a legal secretary. The company had a Wang WPS 5 (??) and I was hired to use it. Within a few weeks, I had automated most of the stuff I needed to do - I had used an IBM "memory" typewriter and was thrilled with the WPS. One of my favorite things to do was to load 1 trust document (maybe 60 pages) and have it print. This would tie up the hard drive so that I couldn't work on anything else as I waited for the daisy wheel printer (complete with soundproof hood) to slowly do its thing. That meant I could go talk with the other secretaries, etc. :-)One of the attorneys really loved the WPS 5 and was always trying to one-up me on what it could do. However, once I discovered macros, he was lost. Soon I had macros for everything, and then I discovered the math feature. Over several weeks, I wrote a macro that did the billing for the firm. They were astounded. This was all done by me, a college graduate, but no computer, programming, or math background. I am not bragging about me, but about the software that allowed me to do this.
At some point, the law firm bought an OIS system. We were thrilled with the speed. I remember asking myself how could I possibly need 5 mb of hard disk space?? We loved the adventure game (which I recently found for the Palm Pilot - deja vu!). After I became an instructor at Wang, my students always asked for the adventure game map that we had.
When I was still at the law firm and when I had questions about WP, I called the local (Columbus, Ohio) field office, so they knew who I was and that I was very familiar with WP. When an instructor position opened up, I was hired to teach word processing and related courses. I worked at Wang from 1982-1988, first as an instructor and then as District Education Manager.
I left Wang after I had my first child and was thinking of staying home. I saw the writing on the wall and didn't want to stay. There was such a huge waste of time and money spent on things that "home office" would tell field offices to do. We never thought home office had any clue what those in the field really needed. I told my husband to sell all our stock (good move).
After reading about the birth of the WPS system, I thought you might enjoy this story: At some point Wang introduced "WP Plus." When the software was delivered, the manuals (written by some dept in home office instead of those of us who actually used and taught the software) were not yet done. For several days I played around and used the help screens and created a manual, which was then used by most field offices in the midwest for several months until the "real" manuals were developed. I guess Wang didn't learn from its previous success with writing the manuals first.
I could go on with Wang stories, but I guess that is enough. It was great to read the website and see some behind the scenes stuff from the old days. Thanks for bringing back some good memories.