An Wang

An Wang founded Wang Laboratories in 1951 and built it into a $3 billion technology company that dominated the office computing market in the 1970s and 1980s. Wang word processors were in every law firm, insurance company, and government office in America — they were the standard for business document creation before the IBM PC and Microsoft Word displaced them.

Wang's technical genius was extraordinary. He held over 40 patents, including fundamental contributions to magnetic core memory — the primary form of computer memory from the 1950s through the 1970s. He sold his core memory patent to IBM for $500,000 (it was worth far more) and used the money to grow Wang Laboratories.

At its peak, Wang Labs employed 33,000 people and Wang himself was the fifth-richest person in America. But he made a fateful decision: he refused to embrace the IBM PC standard, betting instead that Wang's proprietary systems would maintain their dominance. When the PC revolution swept through offices in the late 1980s, Wang Labs collapsed. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1992, two years after Wang's death. His story is both an inspiration — immigrant genius builds a $3B empire — and a cautionary tale about the danger of ignoring platform shifts.