| Sumario: | The article focuses on Wang Laboratories Inc., the Massachusetts-based computer maker that filed for protection under Chapter 11 of America's bankruptcy code on August 18, 1992. Both Wang Laboratories' extraordinary rise and its sad demise were the work of An Wang, the brilliant Chinese immigrant who founded the firm in 1951 as a 31-year-old. By 1984, when the firm's profits reached their apogee, it had grown by 30% or more in each of the previous ten years and boasted 30,000 employees. Wang refused employees' pleas to launch general-purpose personal computers, as arch-rival IBM was doing. This decision was a disaster, sales of personal computers soared and they quickly took market share from Wang's word-processors and its more expensive mid-sized computers.
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