My Dad was a software developer in the UK with Honeywell in the 1960s and after a stint with Wang (yes, I know, ha ha) went independent. As a result we had a variety of Wang minis in the house in the mid-70s when I was a toddler, which must have been fairly unusual. I learnt to write on green-banded continuous stationery!
Thereafter it was the more conventional British route into computing via Clive Sinclair's cheap but, er, cheap, ZX81 for me... but those minis lit the fuse.
>As a result we had a variety of Wang minis in the house in the mid-70s when I was a toddler, which must have been fairly unusual.
Fred Wang, An Wang's son, had the most powerful computing device on campus in his dorm room at Brown University in 1968. He set up a schedule for classmates to use it for schoolwork.
Many years later one of my Dad's customers paid me and my college housemates £10 to take away a Wang MVP system with four chonky terminals from their London offices.
We drove it all the way to Wales and had it in our shared student house for the rest of that year. Fun times.
New that system would have been something like £40,000 in late 70s/early 80s money so that was a stark introduction to asset depreciation for us!
We did have fun with it, but sadly we left it for our landlord to deal with at the end of the year. Kind of a dick move in retrospect.
I think all of us had our own PCs that were individually more powerful than that system.
Thereafter it was the more conventional British route into computing via Clive Sinclair's cheap but, er, cheap, ZX81 for me... but those minis lit the fuse.