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Getronics
A Dutch electrical firm from the 1880s that ended up owning what was left of Wang Laboratories.
Getronics traces to Groeneveld, van der Poll & Co., a Dutch electrotechnical business of the late nineteenth century. It is on this timeline for one reason: in 1999 it acquired Wang Global, and so became the place a company that had defined word processing came to rest.
Wang Laboratories had peaked at around $3B in revenue in the 1980s and employed 33,000 people. By 1999 what Getronics bought was Wang Global, the services business that remained after the hardware era ended.
The pieces continued to move. Getronics North America was sold to KPN in 2007, and on to CompuCom of Dallas in 2008 - so the residue of Wang passed through three more owners after the acquisition that supposedly concluded it.
That trajectory is the ordinary shape of a technology ending. Companies rarely stop; they are absorbed, split, and resold until the original name survives only in a lineage page like this one.
- Getronics (Wikipedia): the infobox dates the company to 1 September 1887 as Electrical Factory N.V., part of Groeneveld, Van der Pol & Co, and the article opens “founded in 1887”; Dutch-headquartered ICT services, around 4,000 staff, a founding member of the Global Workspace Alliance
Fetched 2026-10-02. This settles the 1887 the entry carries, which until now no citation, no entry copy and no profile stated. It also names whose founding it is: the year belongs to Electrical Factory N.V. within Groeneveld, Van der Pol & Co, not to anything called Getronics.
- Wikipedia: Wang Laboratories - acquisition by Getronics in 1999 and the subsequent sales to KPN and CompuCom
- Wang Laboratories SEC filing (SC 14D1, 1999) on the Getronics transaction