This makes me nostalgic so the following might get a little long...

My late father, after a short stint with Wang, set himself up as an independent developer creating bespoke software (usually book-keeping) for smaller companies in Wang 2200 BASIC.

As a consequence these machines regularly turned up in our small middle-class living room. I pretty much learnt to write on green-lined fanfold paper and I played in the huge boxes that they arrived in. Family legend has it that at a very tender age when asked what I wanted for Christmas I answered "pooter" ( a story later embellished further as that having been my first word).

Enjoyable memories:

The terminal's keyboard had a "TRON" key (TRace ON and there was a TROFF key for TRace OFF, which caused the line of BASIC code executing to be displayed on the screen).

Those little compact cassette drives in the terminal were intended for data only, but in practice didn't get much use once (8 inch) floppy disks were added. They may have had some superior tape speed but the media was otherwise a completely normal (but very short) compact cassette. My father had various programs recorded from the radio on spare ones at about 10 minutes per cassette or so (both sides) with the inevitable missed bit while he'd swapped tapes. Frustrating to listen to on long car journeys.

When you activated the cassette tape drive in the terminal, the fields from the electric drive motors distorted the display on the adjacent CRT.

At one point we had an Apple II system on trial, but nothing came of that (I don't know why), and then a ZX81 that was sufficiently close to being a toy that it ended up in my own hands at the age of 9 and I taught myself to program from the manual.

I have to mention that mentioning in the school playground that my Dad "programmed Wangs" did not go down particularly well.

Once the IBM PC arrived on the scene it was fairly obvious that the Wang days were numbered, but a licensed emulation package from Niakwa allowed my Dad to keep on plugging away in 2200 BASIC for a good long while after that.

If I remember rightly the Niakwa system was originally run on the Wang PC, a weird DOS based but not IBM compatible system (mentioned in other threads here). I had the fun of teaching myself how to use a demo version of AutoCAD on that machine and then my Dad had me demo it to a manufacturing customer. That demo went down very well, from a barely-teenaged kid I guess it proved ease of use!

Some while later, during a summer break from college, my Dad asked me to see if I thought I could convert one of his old programs to a more modern language. I was given access to one of the real Wang 2200 MVP terminals at a customer site to take a look through the code. Pure spaghetti code! No comments (REM statements) to give me a clue, all sorts of clever PACK/UNPACK processing to make maximum use of what had originally been very restricted amounts of memory. It didn't help that the terminal was in a cupboard with a movement detector on the light so I had to stand up and wave my arms around every five minutes or so when that turned off. He didn't seem too surprised when I threw in the towel.

A different client had a big MVP machine (with capacity for eight terminals I think) that they wanted to get rid of - some college friends and I picked it up and we had it set up in our student house. It sounded like a jet engine winding up when you turned it on.

Some of the customers were a nuisance, but others became family friends. His last and best, the one to whom I demonstrated AutoCAD, is still in business, and attended my father's funeral.

I kind of miss those noisy old machines. Not as much as I miss my Dad though.