Real Estate Deal of the 20th Century
Going to tell you about the Best/Worst Real Estate deal ever.
Pirate Mike worked for Wang Laboratories for 21 years. (look them up on Wikipedia; it’s quite a tale!) Then he worked for the European company that bought out the bankrupted and reorganized Wang for a few years after that. A little like slavery that. Being traded to new overlords!
Somebody should make a movie or even an opera about the rise and fall of an immigrant’s American dream. There’s already a pretty good book called, “Riding The Runaway Horse” by Charles C. Kenney. Wang means horse in Chinese, btw.
Anyhow, back in the heyday of Wang Labs, the Wang Office Tower complex in Lowell, MA, was built. Three towers, over a million square feet of office space costing over $60 million spamolas. In 1992, Wang went into bankruptcy and the bank(banks?) foreclosed on lots of Wang properties. The Towers were sold for $525,000. For crying out loud, a 3 bedroom rancher in Santa Monica costs more than that! Now the gigantic complex houses a whole bunch of different companies.
And Wang is just a memory- one of the early casualties of the High Tech world.
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March 2nd, 2008 at 6:35 pm
I bought a computer from a company called Quantex back in the late 90’s sometime. Maybe 97. Not sure. Anyway, sometime between the time they shipped it to me and the time I received it (about a week) they went bankrupt.
Imagine my shock and surprise when I called them for support and got a recorded message telling me they were out of business.
Fortunately, other than a very minor glitch very early on, the computer lasted me for almost 10 years.