Wang's indifference to academics doesn't seem to have infected his only
child, a 20-year-old girl now attending college. "She's doing very well," says
Wang, refusing to disclose the name of her college. "She's a B+ student. I
barely graduated." But Wang enjoys the last laugh. "I'm now a trustee of
Queens College Foundation Board. The president of the college always
threatens to pull my grades up."
Wang's remarkably practical approach to life can be seen again in the way
he got into computer programming. In his senior year, faced with the
question of what to do after graduation, he decided to find out what kind of
workers were in demand. He turned to the classified pages of The New
York Times. "I still remember there were two and a half pages of
programmer ads," he recalls. "So I told my mother, I think I'm going to be a
programmer. She says, 'What's that?' I said, 'I don't know, Mom, but boy,
they need 'em.'"
"When I was going to college we didn't have a computer science department
or anything. I didn't even know what a computer was." Wang did a little
research at the college placement office. "I started to read about what a
computer is and it looked fascinating." He saw a heavy demand for scientific
programmers, a demand he thought he could help fill with his background in
math and physics. The best course, he decided, would be to find a job as a
programmer trainee which would also preclude getting drafted at the height
of the Vietnam War. "I didn't think I would be the greatest soldier whereas
I could use my brains to help."
He became a programmer trainee at the Electronics Research Laboratory of
Columbia University. One of the lab's tasks was to receive magnetic tapes of
radar data of missile firings from the White Sands Missile Range and reduce
them into data from which trajectories could be plotted. Wang's first
assignment was to write programs that would enable computers to perform
the data reduction.
"They weren't teaching you to program," he recalls. "What they did was give
you a programming manual and say, 'Learn to program.'"
During his four years at Columbia he became friends with a fellow
programmer named Russ Artzt. In 1971 Wang and Artzt moved to Standard
Data Corporation which was mainly a service bureau that handled batch
processing for pension funds. The two young men became part of SDC's
four-man soft-ware division, "a nothing division", as Wang calls it in his
Bronx-Jew accent.
The software division's business was writing and selling systems programs
that enhanced the usefulness of IBM mainframes to business clients. Its
products were tapes containing programs and the accompanying manuals.
Virtually ignored by SDC, the little division functioned virtually as a separate
small business. "Russ and I, we did everything--we sold, we programmed.
We did everything." A key component of the business was servicing clients
by traveling to the client's businesss and listening to their needs and
problems, and trying to provide solutions. This, more than any other aspect
of the business, seems to have excited Wang's imagination to conceive the
idea of his own software company.
[CONTINUED BELOW]
"The biggest problem with the industry was that it was technology-driven
only," he says. "They were not listening to clients to say, 'What is your
problem?' They were so busy in their ivory towers developing what I call
elegant solutions in search of problems." Wang felt that he could create a
successful business by simply listening to clients and giving them what they
wanted.
"What other business in the world [was as] successful [as] the
computer and software industry [already was] at that time [without even]
listening to the clients? Boy, if somebody listened to the clients, what an
opportunity!"
Neither Wang nor Russ Artzt had the money with which to start a new
business. But an opportunity presented itself. SDC's software division had
been marketing a piece of software for a Swiss company. Toward the end of
1975 the Swiss company was looking for an American company to market a
new systems software for IBM mainframes called CA-SORT which was
already being distributed in Europe. CA-SORT was a fully compatible
sort-merge program that ran 25% faster than IBM's in-house version while
using only half the disk-storage space. The product had a heady potential in
the batch days when the sort-merge function typically took up 25% of the
capacity of a multi-million-dollar IBM mainframe. CA-SORT could save a
business hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machine capacity.
Wang had been talking with the Swiss company about the possibility of
marketing CA-SORT through SDC. Such an agreement would have required
SDC to redouble its commitment to the software business. Finding itself at a
crossroads, SDC's management decided in early 1976 that it would rather go
out of software. Here was Wang's chance to try building a marketing-driven
software house. Married and the father of a six-year-old daughter, Wang
was gambler enough to forego the security of a guaranteed salary to become
owner of the new company which he named Computer Associates, CA for
short. What made the deal possible was that SDC didn't insist on cash up
front, agreeing instead to take a couple of hundred thousand dollars to be
paid out of earnings over several years. The deal gave CA a few pieces of
systems software for IBM mainframes and a small roster of clients -- just
enough for it to call itself a software company. Wang recognized that what
CA needed was a significant new product with which to broaden its client
base, a product like CA-SORT. Even before the buyout was concluded, he
convinced the Swiss company to sell CA the exclusive right to market
CA-SORT in America for 50% of CA's shares. This kind of product-for-equity
swap would become a hallmark of Wang's strategy for rapidly expanding
CA's client and product bases.
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