Hartley Hoskins, center, Bob Groman, right, and Gordon Glass posed for a photo to accompany an article on WHOI’s word processing system in a 1980 Wang Laboratories magazine. Hartley says one of the advantages of the Wang system was that it was designed for networking from the get-go. Wang work stations and servers on each side of the Eel Pond channel were connected by twin coaxial cables threaded through one of the two pipes that delivered water from the former salt water tanks in the attic of Bigelow to the Redfield aquarium. Bob Groman, then a systems analyst and programmer in the G&G Department, was part of the team that chose the Wang system. It was initiated in Clark Laboratory with nine workstations, two printers, and 2.5 megabytes of disk storage (about one-ten-thousandth of that on a typical desktop computer today). Gordon Glass, the Ocean Engineering Department’s executive assistant, was a major force in expanding the system to include six workstations, two printers, and five megabytes of storage in Woods Hole village.

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