A modern External Electronic Package for the Wang 300 Series calculator #Calculators
galacticstudios.org has made a modern replacement for the Wang 300 series calculator Electronic Package. Not only does it emulate the original Wang calculator’s behavior, but it can operate as a nixie clock.
The Wang 300 series calculators consisted of an Electronic Package (as Wang called it), where calculations were executed using discrete diode-transistor logic, and up to four keyboard/display consoles. The consoles were basically dumb terminals: they were connected to the Electronic Package (EP) via a 36-conductor cable. The EP scanned the keyboard for key presses and displayed digits on the multiplexed nixie tubes.
This new, modern, external Electronic Package has the disadvantage of using more desk space (though it is much smaller than Wang’s original Electronic Package). But it has the advantages of being trivially easy to connect to a Wang 300 series console, supporting the trigonometry keys, and probably supporting Wang’s CP-1 Card Programmer, which allowed users to write macros for the calculator.
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