An Wang

Wang was a Harvard physicist who patented a key technique for magnetic core memory, founded Wang Laboratories in 1951 on a few hundred dollars of savings and later sold the patent to IBM, which funded the growth. His understanding of digital electronics produced desktop calculators and then the dedicated word processors that offices bought in huge numbers in the 1970s. He misjudged the personal computer and insisted on his son succeeding him, and the company went bankrupt soon after his death in 1990.