title: Wang Laboratories

text: The company's first major project was the Linasec in 1964, an electronic special-purpose computer designed to justify paper tape for use on automated Linotype machines. It was developed under contract to phototypesetter manufacturer Compugraphic, which retained the rights to manufacture the Linasec without royalty. They exercised these rights, forcing Wang out of the market.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The Wang LOCI-2 (Logarithmic Computing Instrument) desktop calculator (the earlier LOCI-1 in September 1964 was not a real product) was introduced in January 1965. Using "factor combining", it was the first desktop calculator capable of computing logarithms, which was quite an achievement for a machine without any integrated circuits. The electronics included 1,275 discrete transistors. It performed multiplication by adding logarithms, and roundoff in the display conversion was noticeable: 2 × 2 yielded 3.999999999.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: From 1965 to about 1971, Wang was a well-regarded calculator company. The dollar price of Wang calculators was in the mid-four-figures. They used Nixie tube readouts, performed transcendental functions, had varying degrees of programmability, and used magnetic core memory. The 200 and 300 calculator models were available as time-shared simultaneous (SE) packages that had a central processing unit the size of a small suitcase connected by cables leading to four individual desktop display/keyboard units. Competition included HP, which introduced the HP 9100A in 1968, and old-line calculator companies such as Monroe and Marchant.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang calculators were at first sold to scientists and engineers, but the company later became established in financial services industries, which had relied on complicated printed tables for mortgages and annuities.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: In the early 1970s, Wang believed that calculators would become unprofitable low-margin commodities and left the calculator business.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang's first attempt at a word processor was the Wang 1200, announced in late 1971 but not available until 1972. The design consisted of the logic of a Wang 500 calculator hooked up to an OEM-manufactured IBM Selectric typewriter for keying and printing, and dual cassette decks for storage. Harold Koplow, who had written the microcode for the Wang 700 and its derivative the Wang 500 rewrote the microcode to perform word processing functions instead of numerical calculations.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The operator of a Wang 1200 typed text on a conventional IBM Selectric keyboard; when the Return key was pressed, the line of text was stored on a cassette tape. One cassette held roughly 20 pages of text and could be "played back" (e.g., the text retrieved) by printing the contents on continuous-form paper in the 1200 typewriter's "print" mode. The stored text could also be edited using keys on a simple, six-key array. Basic editing functions included Insert, Delete, Skip (character, line), and so on.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The labor and cost savings of this device were immediate and remarkable: pages of text no longer had to be retyped to correct simple errors, and projects could be worked on, stored, and then retrieved for use later on. The rudimentary Wang 1200 machine was the precursor of the Wang Office Information System (OIS), which revolutionized the way typing projects were performed in the American workplace.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Following the Wang 1200, Harold Koplow and David Moros made another attempt at designing a word processor. They started by first writing the user's manual for the product. A 2002 "Boston Globe" article refers to Koplow as a "wisecracking rebel" who "was waiting for dismissal when, in 1975, he developed the product that made computers popularly accessible."


title: Wang Laboratories

text: In Koplow's words, "Dr. Wang kicked me out of marketing. I, along with Dave Moros, was relegated to Long Range Planning – 'LRPed'. This ... was tantamount to being fired: 'here is a temporary job until you find another one in some other company.'"


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Although he and Moros perceived the assignment to design a word processing machine as busywork, they went ahead anyway. They wrote the manual and convinced An Wang to turn it into a real project. The word processing machinethe Wang 1200 WPSwas introduced in June 1976 and was an instant success, as was its successor, the 1977 Wang OIS (Office Information System).


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The OIS was a multi-user system. Each workstation looked like a typical terminal but contained its own Intel 8080 microprocessor (later versions used a Z80) and 64 KB of RAM (less than the original 1981 IBM PC). Disk storage was centralized in a master unit and shared by the workstations, and the connection was via high-speed dual coaxial cable "928 Link".


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Ahead of IBM and Xerox, Wang captured the lead for "the 'intelligent' printer: a high-speed office copier that can be linked electronically" to PCs "and other automated equipment". A year later, "The New York Times" described the IBM 6670 "Information Distributor" as "closer to the standard envisioned".


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang's first computer, the Wang 3300, was an 8-bit integrated circuit general-purpose minicomputer designed to be the central processor for a multi-terminal time-sharing system. Byte-oriented, it also provided a number of double-byte operand memory commands. Core memory ranged from 4,096 to 65,536 bytes in 4,096-byte increments.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Development began after hiring Rick Bensene in June 1968. The product was announced in February 1969 and shipped to its first customer on March 29, 1971.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang developed and marketed several lines of small computer systems for both word processing and data processing. Instead of a clear, linear progression, the product lines overlapped and, in some cases, borrowed technology from each other.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The most identifiable Wang minicomputer performing recognizable data processing was the Wang 2200, which appeared in May 1973. Unlike some other desktop computers such as the HP 9830, it had a CRT in a cabinet that also included an integrated computer-controlled compact cassette storage unit and keyboard. It was microcoded to run interpreted BASIC. It was widely used in small- and medium-sized businesses worldwide; about 65,000 systems were shipped.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The original 2200 was a single-user system. The improved VP model increased performance more than tenfold and enhanced the language (renamed BASIC-2). The 2200 VP evolved into a desktop computer and larger MVP system to support up to 16 workstations and utilized commercial disk technologies that appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The disk subsystems could be attached to up to 15 computers giving a theoretical upper limit of 240 workstations in a single cluster.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Unlike the other product lines, such as the VS and OIS (described below), Wang used value-added resellers (VARs) to customize and market 2200 systems. One such creative solution deployed dozens of 2200 systems and was developed in conjunction with Hawaii- and Hong Kong-based firm Algorithms, Inc. It provided paging (beeper) services for much of the Hong Kong market in the early 1980s.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Overshadowed by the Wang VS, the 2200 languished as a cost-effective but forgotten solution in the hands of the customers who had it. In the late 1980s, Wang revisited the 2200 series one last time, offering 2200 customers a new 2200 CS with bundled maintenance for less than customers were paying at the time just for maintenance of their aging 2200s. The 2200 CS had an Intel 386 processor, updated disk units, and other peripherals. Most 2200 customers upgraded to the 2200 CS, after which Wang did not develop or market any new 2200 products. In 1997, Wang reported having about two hundred 2200 systems still under maintenance around the world. Throughout, Wang had always offered maintenance services for the 2200.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The 2200 BASIC-2 language was ported to be compiled and run on non-Wang hardware and operating systems by at least two companies. Niakwa Inc created a product named NPL (originally named Basic-2C). Kerridge Computer, now a part of ADP, created a product named KCML. Both products support DOS, Windows, and various Unix systems. The BASIC-2 language was enhanced and extended by both companies to meet modern needs. Compared to the 2200 Wang hardware, the compiled solutions improved speed, disk space, memory, and user limits by tens to hundreds of times; although there is no Wang support for the 2200, many software applications continue to function.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: During the 1970s, about 2,000 Wang 2200T computers were shipped to the USSR. Due to the Afghan war in the 1980s, US and COCOM export restrictions ended the shipment of Wang computers. The Soviets were in great need of computers. In 1981, Russian engineers at Minpribor's Schetmash factory in Kursk reverse engineered the Wang 2200T and created a computer they named the Iskra 226. The "COCOM restrictions" theory, though, while popular in the West, is challenged by some Russian computer historians on the basis that development for the Iskra-226 started in 1978, two years before the Afghan war. It is also different from the Wang 2200 in its internals, being more inspired by it rather than a direct clone.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: It used the same BASIC language (named T-BASIC) with a few enhancements. Many research papers reference calculations done on the Iskra 226. The machine's designers were nominated for a 1985 State Prize. Later, a somewhat scaled-down Unix implementation was created for Iskra-226, which was used in the Soviet Union.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang had a line called Alliance, which was based on the high-end OIS (140/145) hardware architecture. It had more powerful software than the OIS word processing and list processing packages. The system was Tempest certified, leading to global deployment in American embassies after the Iran hostage crisis. The Z80 platform on which Alliance ran forced it to remain as an 8-bit application in a 64 KB workstation.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The first Wang VS computer was introduced in 1977, the same year as Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX; both continued for decades. The VS instruction set was compatible with the IBM 360 series, but it did not run any IBM 360 system software.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The VS operating system and all system software were built from the ground up to support interactive users as well as batch operations. The VS was aimed at the business data processing market in general and IBM in particular. While many programming languages were available, the VS was programmed in COBOL. Other languages supported in the VS integrated development environment included Assembler, COBOL 74, COBOL 85, BASIC, Ada, RPG II, C, PL/I, FORTRAN, Glossary, MABASIC, SPEED II, and Procedure (a scripting language). Pascal was also supported for I/O co-processor development. The Wang PACE (Professional Application Creation Environment) 4GL and database was used from the mid-1980s onward by customers and third-party developers to build complex applications, sometimes involving many thousands of screens, hundreds of distinct application modules, and serving many hundreds of users. Substantial vertical applications were developed for the Wang VS by third-party software houses throughout the 1980s in COBOL, PACE, BASIC, PL/I, and RPG II. The Wang OFFICE family of applications and Wang WP were both popular applications on the VS. Word Processing ran on the VS through services that emulated the OIS environment and downloaded the WP software as "microcode" (in Wang terminology) to VS workstations.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The press and the industry referred to the class of machines made by Wang, including the VS, as "minicomputers,"and Kenney's 1992 book refers to the VS line as "minicomputers" throughout. Although some argue that the high-end VS machines and their successors should qualify as mainframes, Wang avoided this term. In his autobiography, An Wang, rather than calling the VS 300 a mainframe, said that it "verges on mainframe performance." He went on to draw the distinction between the "mainframes" at the high end of IBM's line ("just as Detroit would rather sell large cars ... so IBM would rather sell mainframes")—in which IBM had a virtual monopoly—with the "mid-sized systems" in which IBM had not achieved dominance: "The minicomputer market is still healthy. This is good for the customer and good for minicomputer makers."


title: Wang Laboratories

text: An Wang felt a personal sense of rivalry with IBM, partly due to heavy-handed treatment by IBM in 1955–56 over the rights to his magnetic-core patents (this encounter formed the subject of a long chapter in Wang's own book, "Lessons"). According to Charles C. Kenney, "Jack Connors remembers being in Wang's office one day when the Doctor pulled out a chart on which he had plotted Wang's growth and projected that Wang Laboratories would overtake IBM sometime in the middle of the 1990s. 'He had kept it a long time,' says Connors. 'And he "believed" it.'"


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang was one of the first computer companies to advertise on television and the first to run an ad during the Super Bowl in 1978. Their first ad literally cast Wang Laboratories as David and IBM as Goliath, several years before the famous 1984 Apple Computer ad. A later ad depicted Wang Laboratories as a helicopter gunship taking aim at IBM.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang wanted to compete against IBM as a computer company, selling to management information system departments. The calculators, word processing systems, and OIS were sold into individual departments, bypassing the corporate data-processing decision-makers. The chapter in Wang's book dealing with them shows that he saw them as "a beachhead in the Fortune 1000." The Wang VS was Wang's entry into IT departments. In his book, An Wang notes that, to sell the VS, "we aggressively recruited salesmen with strong backgrounds in data processing ... who had experience dealing with MIS executives, and who knew their way around Fortune 1000 companies." As the VS took hold, the word processor and OIS lines were phased out. The word processing software continued, in the form of a loadable-microcode environment that allowed VS workstations to take on the behavior of traditional Wang WP terminals to operate with the VS and use it as a document server.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang made inroads into IBM and DEC markets in the 1980s, but did not have a serious impact on IBM's mainframe market due to self-limiting factors. Even though An Wang wanted to compete with IBM, too many Wang salespeople weren't trained enough on the DP capabilities of the VS. In many instances, the VS ran smaller enterprises up to about and, in larger organizations, found use as a gateway to larger corporate mainframes, handling workstation pass-through and massive print services.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: At Exxon Corporation, for instance, thirteen 1985 top-of-the-line VS300s at the Houston headquarters were used in the 1980s and into the 1990s to receive mainframe reports and make them viewable online by executives.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: At Mellon Mortgage, 18 VS systems from the smallest to the largest were used as the enterprise mortgage origination, servicing, finance, documentation, hedge system and mainframe gateway services (for login and printing). Between Mellon Mortgage and parent Mellon Bank, their network contained 45 VS systems and the Bank portion of the network supported about 16,000 Wang Office users for email, report distribution, and scheduling.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: At Kent and KTec Electronics, two related Houston companies, separate VS clusters were the enterprise systems, handling distribution, manufacturing, and accounting, with significant EDI capability for receiving customer forecasts, sending invoices, sending purchase orders, and receiving shipping notifications. Both systems ran the GEISCO EDI package. Kent, which grew to , ran the Arcus distribution software in COBOL and KTec, which grew to , ran the MRP system for manufacturing in BASIC.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: In the late 1980s, a British television documentary accused the company of targeting a competitor, Canadian company AES Wordplex, in an attempt to take it out of the market. However, the documentary came to no conclusion regarding this.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang's approach was called "The Gas Cooker Program," named after similar programs to give discounts on new gas stoves by trading in an old one. Wang was accused of targeting Wordplex by offering a large discount on Wang OIS systems with a trade-in of Wordplex machines, regardless of the age or condition of the trade-in machine.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Based on its good reputation with users and its program of aggressive discounts, Wang gained an increasing share of a shrinking market. Wordplex was taken over by Norsk Data.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The market for standalone word processing systems collapsed with the introduction of the personal computer. MultiMate, on the IBM PC, and MS-DOS PC clones, replicated the keyboard and screen interface and functions of the Wang word processor, and was actively marketed to Wang corporate users, while several other WYSIWYG word processing programs also became popular.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang did make one last play in this arena, producing a dedicated Intel-based word processor called the Wang Office Assistant in 1984. This was marketed and sold successfully in the UK to a specific few office equipment dealers who were able to upgrade their clients from electronic typewriters to the Office Assistant. They proved to be very reliable and fast when connected to the Wang bi-directional printer, providing cheap but very fast word processing to small companies (such as solicitors). The USA was surprised at the success of this machine in the UK, but could not supply a spell-check programme in time before the PC. The PC, with its flexibility of combining word processors with other programs such as spreadsheets, had rendered such a specific-task machine unsellable. The Wang Office Assistant had a short life span of four years.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The Wang DVX was one of the first integrated switchboard and voicemail systems. In the United Kingdom, it was selected for the DTI Office Automation pilot schemes at the National Coal Board in about 1980.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Internal research on speech recognition was carried out and implemented for discrete word recognition but was never released to the field. At one point there were 50 members of the Voice Engineering Department.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Lawrence E. Bergeron was instrumental in managing the Voice Engineering Department at Wang Labs. He promoted the purchase of a VAX-11/780 for 'real-time' signal processing research and created the Peripheral Signal Processor board (PSP). The PSP was placed into 16 racks to handle 128 phone lines for the DVX (Digital Voice Exchange). Wang's Digital Voice Exchange supported the renting of voice mailboxes. Voice prompts were created by a hired voice specialist to give a melodic presentation for the DVX. To avoid false triggering of touch-tones by the prompts (due to input/output cross talk), notch filters were created to remove the touch tone frequencies from the prompts. Prompt languages supported included German, Spanish, French, British English, American English, and Portuguese.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Despite the release of the 2200 PCS (Personal Computer System) and 2200 PCS-II models in 1976, the history of computing regards the earliest PC as one which contained a microprocessor, which the 2200 PCS did not. However, the self-contained PCS-II incorporated many of the innovations that would later be seen in PCs, including the first 5.25-inch floppy drives that were designed for the PCS-II by Shugart Associates.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The original Wang PC was released in April 1982 to counter the IBM PC, which had been released the previous August and which had gained wide acceptance in the market for which Wang traditionally positioned the OIS system. It was based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor, a faster CPU than the IBM PC's 8088. A hardware/software package that permitted the Wang PC to act as a terminal to the OIS and VS products was available. The first version of the hardware component was made of two large add-in boards called the WLOC (Wang Local Office Connection). It contained a Z-80 processor and 64 KB of memory. The original PC-VS hardware used the 928 terminal emulator board; the WLOC boards were used in the subsequent 80286 machines.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: These PCs later formed the basis for the system console on VS7000 and later series of the Wang mid-frame series, being used for the initialisation of the boot process. One of the distinguishing features of the Wang PC was the system software. Similar to the Wang VS minicomputer, the command line was not evident. Everything could be run from menus, including formatting a disk. Furthermore, each item on a menu could be explained by hitting a help key on the keyboard. This software was later sold in MS-DOS-compatible form for non-Wang hardware. The Wang word processing software was also very graphical. The keyboard had 16 function-keys and, unlike WordStar (the popular word processor of the day), control key combinations were not required to navigate the system. The F-keys had the word processing functions labeled on them.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Despite being a compliant MS-DOS system, it was not compatible with the IBM PC at the hardware level, because MS-DOS was used as a simple program loader. Complex software (spreadsheets, Flight Simulator, etc.) could obtain acceptable performance by direct manipulation of the hardware. Wang used a 16-bit data bus instead of the 8-bit data bus used by IBM, arguing that applications would run much faster since most operations required I/O (disk, screen, keyboard, printer). With this 16-bit design, Wang used peripheral hardware devices, such as the Wang PC display adapter, that were not compatible with their counterparts in the IBM PC line. This meant that the vast library of software available for the IBM PC could not be directly run on the Wang PC. Only those programs that were either written for the Wang PC or ported from the IBM PC were available. Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase II were also available. This lack of application software led to the original Wang PC's end, and it was replaced by an Intel 80286-based product that was plug compatible with the IBM PC. The unique system software was available at extra cost.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Most Wang PCs were released with a monochrome graphics adapter that supported a single video mode with text and graphics planes that could be scrolled independently. A color graphics adapter and Wang-branded color monitor were also available.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: An ergonomic feature of the Wang PC was the monitor arm that clamped to the desk and held the monitor above and a system clamp that attached to the side of the desk and held the rather large computer box. By using these, there was nothing on the desktop except the keyboard.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang released an emulation board for Wang PC that enabled operation of many PC-compatible software packages. The board accomplished this by monitoring all I/O and memory transactions (visible in those days before North/South bridge chips to any board plugged into a slot on the expansion bus) and generating a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) whenever an operation was deemed to involve an incompatible device, requiring emulation.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: For example, the floppy controller circuitry on the Wang PC was similar to that of the IBM PC but involved enough design differences that PC-compatible software attempting to manipulate it directly would fail. Wang's PC emulation hardware would detect I/O and memory operations involving the addresses associated with the floppy controller in the IBM PC and generate an NMI. The NMI handler would be activated (the exception vector having been appropriated during system init to point to ROM routines on the emulation board instead of the NMI routine in the PC BIOS) and would then update an internal representation of the IBM PC floppy controller and manipulate the real controller to reflect its state. Reads were satisfied in a similar way, by forcing an NMI, decoding the machine code indicated by the instruction pointer at the time of the fault, and then obtaining the desired info and updating the CPU registers accordingly before resuming the executing program.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: IBM PC-emulation on the 8086-based Wang PC was working well when IBM released their 80286-based PC-AT, so Wang made the 80286-based Wang APC (Advanced Professional Computer).


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Further iterations of the PC line were released commencing with the model number PC-240. They booted into MS-DOS or another compatible operating system, and supported ISA-standard expansion cards.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: This PC-240 was still not IBM PC-standard, as the keyboard, although a standard PC/AT device, supported VS-compatibility with 24 function keys rather than the normal 12, and had a number of Wang VS-specific keys. There was also a slight difference in CPU interrupts from IBM standard, so some software had compatibility issues.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: VS connectivity was via an ISA-based VS-terminal card, or via LightSpeed, the networked VS Terminal Emulator, over an IPX-based Ethernet connection. The PC-240 came with a Wang-specific Hercules Graphics Card and compatible screen, which also acted as a keyboard extension, so that the base unit could be kept some distance from the screen. This was later replaced with an EGA card and screen.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Around 1991, Wang released the PC350-16 and PC350-40, which were Intel 80386-based, clocked at 16 MHz and 40 MHz. They used the same VS-compatible keyboard as the PC-240, had a maximum of 4 megabytes of RAM, and came with VGA screens as standard. They were supplied by Microsoft with MS-DOS and Windows 3.0.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The 350-16 had a bug where the machine would freeze and not boot up if power-cycled at the mains. Although it would power on, the BIOS would not start. The solution was to turn on the machine at the mains and hold down the power button for 30 seconds, at which point it would start. It was suggested that this was due to an under-valued capacitor in the power circuit. This problem appeared to be resolved in the 350–40, which had a different PSU.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: In 1992, Wang marketed a PC-compatible based on the Intel 80386SX processor, which they called the Alliance 750CD. It was clocked at 25 MHz and had a socket for an 80387 math coprocessor. It came with 2 megabytes of installed RAM, and was expandable to 16 megabytes using SIMM memory cards. It had a 1.44 megabyte floppy disk drive, an internal 80 megabyte hard disk, and a CD-ROM drive. Five expansion slots were built-in. It came with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 operating systems.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: In 1994, Wang released the slimline Alliance 750CD 80486 based PC in the United Kingdom. These machines used standard PC/AT keyboards and were IBM compatible, shipping with MSDOS 5.0 and Windows 3.11 as standard. System BIOS settings and the real-time clock were maintained by four standard AA batteries instead of a specialty battery pack or lithium battery. While offered with a 33 MHz 80486DX, the 750CD could be upgraded to later Socket 3 processors such as the 80486DX2 through the use of third party CPU upgrade adapters or interposers. This allowed upgrading to speeds beyond 50 MHz without overclocking, or more than 100 MHz with overclocking, dependent on the processor used.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The pricing of the low-end product at precluded the important features such as "facsimile and voice options" (priced at ). "Freestyle" was not a success in anything except marketing terms. A description of the system at the University of Southern California (USC) shows the symptoms of the failure:


title: Wang Laboratories

text: "The USC system includes a VS 7150 mid-range computer; 30 image workstations, 25 with Freestyle capabilities; a laser printer; five endorsers; and five document scanners. Initial storage for document images is eight gigabytes of magnetic disk storage."


title: Wang Laboratories

text: 25 of the stations were Freestyle stations. The Freestyle was only affordable for highly specialized or very senior staff in Wang Laboratories. It was sold as a C-Level tool for C grades to communicate with other C Grades. This reduced the marketplace immediately from the mass market, where the system would have been effective.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang Labs was one of a large number of New England-based computer companies that faltered in the late 1980s and 1990s, marking the end of the Massachusetts Miracle. For instance, the struggling Digital Equipment Corporation also downsized in the 1990s and was acquired by Compaq.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: A common view within the PC community is that Wang Labs failed because it specialized in computers designed specifically for word processing and did not foresee and could not compete with general-purpose personal computers with word-processing software in the 1980s. Word processing was not actually the mainstay of Wang's business by the time desktop computers began to gain in popularity. Although Wang manufactured desktops, its main business by the 1980s was its VS line of mini-computer and "midframe" systems. The market for these mini-computers was conquered by enhanced micro-computers like the Apple Macintosh and the Wintel PC and Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard servers.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: An Wang's insistence that his son, Fred Wang, succeed him contributed to the company's failure. Fred Wang was a business school graduate, "but by almost any definition", wrote Charles C. Kenney, "unsuited for the job in which his father had placed him." His assignment, first as head of research and development, then as president of the company, led to resignations by key R&D and business personnel. Amid declining revenues, John F. Cunningham, an 18-year employee of the firm, resigned as president and COO of Wang Labs to become chairman and chief executive of Computer Consoles Inc. Cunningham resigned due to disagreement with An Wang on how to pull the company out of the slump, as well as being upset that Fred Wang was positioned, nepotistically, as An Wang's successor.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: One turning point occurred when Fred Wang was head of R&D. On October 4, 1983, Wang Laboratories announced fourteen major hardware and software products and promised dates of delivery. The announcement was well received, but even at the time, there were warning signs. According to Datamation, Wang announced "everything but the kitchen sink. And if you could attach the kitchen sink to a personal computer, they would announce that too." Very few of the products were close to completion, and many of them had not even been started. All were delivered late, if at all. In retrospect, this was referred to as the "vaporware announcement," and it hurt the credibility of Fred Wang and Wang Laboratories.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: In 1986, Fred Wang, then 36 years old, was installed as president of Wang Laboratories. However, the company's fortunes continued to decline. Unlike most computer companies that funded their growth by issuing stock, An Wang had used debt to avoid further dilution of family control of the company. By August 1989, that debt was causing conflicts with its creditors. On August 4, 1989, An Wang fired his son. Richard W. Miller, who had been with the company since 1988, replaced him as the president of Wang Laboratories.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Miller announced in December 1989 that the company would start to embrace established software standards rather than use traditional proprietary designs. An Wang died in March 1990, and Miller took on the additional posts of chairman and CEO. The company underwent massive restructuring and eliminated its bank debt in August 1990, but it still ended the year with a record net loss.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: In November 1990, Wang announced their first personal computers running Unix. In 1987, Wang developed a new typesetting system in conjunction with Arlington, MA-based Texet Corp. The system used Xerox printers and UNIX workstations from Sun, but the product vanished before coming to market, because few Wang employees could use or support UNIX. UNIX ran on the VSInteractive Systems first ported IN/ix (their IBM360 version of SYS5 UNIX) to run in a VSOS Virtual machine circa 1985, and then Wang engineers completed the port so that it ran "native" on the VS hardware soon thereafterbut performance was always sub-par as UNIX was never a good fit for the batch-mode nature of the VS hardware, and the line-at-a-time processing approach taken by the VS workstations; indeed, the workstation code had to be rewritten to bundle up each keystroke into a frame to be sent back to the host when running UNIX so that "tty" style processing could be implemented. PACE, which offered its data dictionary, excellent referential integrity, and speedy application development, was in the process of being ported to UNIX under the name OPEN Pace. A client-server RDBMS model built on the original product's ideology, OPEN Pace was demonstrated at the North American PACE User Group Conferences in both Boston and Chicago. OPEN Pace, along with a new Windows-based word processor called UpWord (which was at the time considered a strong contender to retake Wang's original market leadership from Microsoft), were touted as their new direction. However, after a marketing study suggested that it would require large capital investments in order to be viable competitors against Microsoft, both products were abandoned.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Ira Magaziner, who was brought in by Miller in 1990, proposed to take Wang out of the manufacture of computers altogether, and to go big into imaging software instead. In March 1991, the company introduced its Office 2000 marketing strategy, focusing on office productivity.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: In June 1991, Wang started reselling IBM computers, in exchange for IBM investing in Wang stock. Wang hardware strategy to re-sell IBM RS/6000s also included further pursuit of UNIX software.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: In August 1991, Wang won a suit against NEC and Toshiba claiming violation of Wang's patents on single in-line memory modules (SIMMs). The company still recorded a net loss for the 1991 fiscal year.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang Laboratories filed for bankruptcy protection on August 18, 1992, at a time when the company's attempted concession from proprietary to open systems was deemed by some analysts as "too little and too late."


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Wang Labs emerged from bankruptcy on September 20, 1993. As part of its bankruptcy reorganization, the company's iconic headquarters, Wang Towers in Lowell, was sold at auction. The complex, which cost $60 million to build and housed 4,500 workers in over a million square feet (100,000 m) of office space, was sold in 1994 for $525,000. The renovated complex, which is now known as Cross Point, was sold in 1998 to a joint venture of Yale Properties and Blackstone Real Estate Advisors for a price reported to be over $100 million.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The company emerged from bankruptcy with $200 million in hand and embarked on a course of acquisition and self-reinvention, eschewing its former role as an innovative designer and manufacturer of computers and related systems. Later in the 1990s, and under the guidance of then CEO Joe Tucci, with the acquisition of the Olsy division of Olivetti, the company changed its name to Wang Global. By then, Wang had settled on "network services" as its chosen business.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The most advanced VS system, capable of supporting over 1,000 usersthe VS18000 Model 950was released in 1999, and smaller models based on the same CPU chip were released in 2000the VS6760 and the VS6780. These were the last VS-based hardware systems.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: Kodak acquired the Wang Software arm in 1997, strengthening its position in the then-booming document imaging and workflow market.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: In 1999, Wang Global, by then back up to $3.5 billion in annual revenues, was acquired by Getronics of The Netherlands, a $1.5 billion network services company active only in parts of Europe and Australia. Joe Tucci departed Wang after the acquisition. Wang Labs then became Getronics North America.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: In 2005, Getronics announced New VS (VSGX), a product designed to run the VS operating system and all VS software on Intel 80x86 and IBM POWER machines under Linux or Unix, using a hardware abstraction layer. The product was a joint commercial effort of Getronics and TransVirtual Systems, developers of the Wang VS virtualization technology that makes the New VS possible. VS software can be run under New VS without program or data conversion. The New VS combines configured mainstream PC or PowerPC server hardware running virtualization software. It is interoperable with SCSI-based Wang VS tape and disk drives, which provide a means of restoring VS files from standard backup tapes or copying VS disk drives. Wang networking and clustering are supported over TCP/IP.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: In 2007, Getronics operations worldwide were divided and sold to companies in respective local geographies. Dutch telecommunications operator KPN acquired Getronics in North America and some parts of Europe. In July 2008, Getronics North America (now an arm of KPN) announced the ending of support for the legacy VS line as existing contracts expired, and that TransVirtual Systems would be exclusive reseller of the New VS platform. In August 2008, KPN sold Getronics North America to CompuCom of Dallas, Texas.


title: Wang Laboratories

text: The Wang VS product line, not actively marketed since the 1993 bankruptcy and a tiny portion of the Getronics business, survived in use into the 21st century; by 2006, about 1,000 to 2,000 systems remained in service worldwide. In 2014, CompuCom announced that all support for legacy VS systems would cease at the end of 2014, while support for New VS systems would continue through TransVirtual Systems.


title: Momal Sheikh

text: Momal Sheikh () is a Pakistani actress and producer. Her works in serials are "Yeh Zindagi Hai" in 2008 and "Mirat Ul Uroos" in 2013. She made her film debut with 2016 film "Happy Bhag Jayegi". Sheikh also co-produced 2018 film "Wujood" with Shehzad Sheikh under her father production banner Javed Sheikh films which features Danish Taimoor and Saeeda Imtiaz in lead.


title: Momal Sheikh

text: She is the daughter of actor Javed Sheikh and Zinat Mangi and sister of Shehzad Sheikh, niece of Behroze Sabzwari and Saleem Sheikh and cousin of Shehroz Sabzwari. She is married to Nader Nawaz. They have a son named Ibrahim. Momal Sheikh announced the birth of her daughter who was born on 20 August 2020.


title: Momal Sheikh

text: She has worked in television serials such as "Mirat Ul Uroos" on Geo TV. She made her Bollywood film debut with Happy Bhaag Jayegi.


The 2022 United States Senate election in North Dakota was held on November 8, 2022, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the state of North Dakota. Incumbent Republican John Hoeven was first elected in 2010 with 76% of the vote to succeed retiring Democratic–NPL incumbent Byron Dorgan, and won reelection in 2016 with 78.5% of the vote. He ran for a re-election to a third term in office against Democratic-NPL nominee Katrina Christiansen.


title: 2022 United States Senate election in North Dakota

text: Hoeven won reelection to a third term in office with 56.4% of the vote, but his performance was far less impressive than in both of his prior races, and substantially lower than what most polling had indicated. This underperformance was in part attributed to the candidacy of Rick Becker, an independent and former Republican, who took 18.5% of the vote. Additionally, Christiansen's 25% vote share was the highest of any Democratic–NPL candidate for the class 3 Senate seat since Dorgan's landslide 2004 win.


title: The Gifted: Graduation

text: The Gifted: Graduation is a 2020 Thai television series which serves as a sequel to "The Gifted" (2018). The series stars an ensemble cast featuring Korapat Kirdpan (Nanon), Wachirawit Ruangwiwat (Chimon), Harit Cheewagaroon (Sing), Ramida Jiranorraphat (Jane), Atthaphan Phunsawat (Gun), Pattadon Janngeon (Fiat), and Napasorn Weerayuttvilai (Puimek) reprising their roles, joined by Nattawat Finkler (Patrick), Chanikarn Tangabodi (Prim), and Phuwin Tangsakyuen (Phuwin). It chronicles the events two years after "The Gifted", wherein the Gifted Class, students with superpowers, join hands in bringing down the powerful school director and his oppressive system.


title: The Gifted: Graduation

text: Directed by "The Gifted" co-director Waasuthep Ketpetch and collaboratively produced by GMMTV and Parbdee Taweesuk, "The Gifted: Graduation" was one of the twelve television series for 2020 showcased by GMMTV during their "New & Next" event on 15 October 2019. It premiered on GMM 25 and LINE TV on 6 September 2020, airing on Sundays at 20:30 and 22:30 ICT, respectively. The series concluded on 29 November 2020.


title: The Gifted: Graduation

text: Set two years after the events of "The Gifted" (2018), "The Gifted: Graduation" chronicles the struggles of Ritdha High School's Gifted Class, students with superpowers, as they join hands in bringing down the powerful school director (Wanchana Sawasdee) and his oppressive system, a mission started by the class' leading students—the mind-controller Pang (Korapat Kirdpan) and technopath Wave (Wachirawit Ruangwiwat). This sequel also showed how the fight is beyond what happens in Ritdha High School, expanding into a full blown power struggle between Director Supot and the Ministry of Education.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: In digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is a technique for minimizing the distortion artifacts (aliasing) when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution. Anti-aliasing is used in digital photography, computer graphics, digital audio, and many other applications.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: Anti-aliasing means removing signal components that have a higher frequency than is able to be properly resolved by the recording (or sampling) device. This removal is done before (re)sampling at a lower resolution. When sampling is performed without removing this part of the signal, it causes undesirable artifacts such as black-and-white noise.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: In signal acquisition and audio, anti-aliasing is often done using an analog anti-aliasing filter to remove the out-of-band component of the input signal prior to sampling with an analog-to-digital converter. In digital photography, optical anti-aliasing filters made of birefringent materials smooth the signal in the spatial optical domain. The anti-aliasing filter essentially blurs the image slightly in order to reduce the resolution to or below that achievable by the digital sensor (the larger the pixel pitch, the lower the achievable resolution at the sensor level).


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: In computer graphics, anti-aliasing improves the appearance of "jagged" polygon edges, or "jaggies", so they are smoothed out on the screen. However, it incurs a performance cost for the graphics card and uses more video memory. The level of anti-aliasing determines how smooth polygon edges are (and how much video memory it consumes).


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: Near the top of an image with a receding checker-board pattern, the image is both difficult to recognise and not aesthetically appealing. In contrast, when anti-aliased the checker-board near the top blends into grey, which is usually the desired effect when the resolution is insufficient to show the detail. Even near the bottom of the image, the edges appear much smoother in the anti-aliased image. Multiple methods exist, including the sinc filter, which is considered a better anti-aliasing algorithm. When magnified, it can be seen how anti-aliasing interpolates the brightness of the pixels at the boundaries to produce grey pixels since the space is occupied by both black and white tiles. These help make the sinc filter antialiased image appear much smoother than the original.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: In a simple diamond image, anti-aliasing blends the boundary pixels; this reduces the aesthetically jarring effect of the sharp, step-like boundaries that appear in the aliased graphic.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: Anti-aliasing is often applied in rendering text on a computer screen, to suggest smooth contours that better emulate the appearance of text produced by conventional ink-and-paper printing. Particularly with fonts displayed on typical LCD screens, it is common to use subpixel rendering techniques like ClearType. Sub-pixel rendering requires special colour-balanced anti-aliasing filters to turn what would be severe colour distortion into barely-noticeable colour fringes. Equivalent results can be had by making individual sub-pixels addressable as if they were full pixels, and supplying a hardware-based anti-aliasing filter as is done in the OLPC XO-1 laptop's display controller. Pixel geometry affects all of this, whether the anti-aliasing and sub-pixel addressing are done in software or hardware.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: The most basic approach to anti-aliasing a pixel is determining what percentage of the pixel is occupied by a given region in the vector graphic - in this case a pixel-sized square, possibly transposed over several pixels - and using that percentage as the colour.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: A very basic plot of a single, white-on-black anti-aliased point using that method can be done as follows:


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: This method is generally best suited for simple graphics, such as basic lines or curves, and applications that would otherwise have to convert absolute coordinates to pixel-constrained coordinates, such as 3D graphics. It is a fairly fast function, but it is relatively low-quality, and gets slower as the complexity of the shape increases. For purposes requiring very high-quality graphics or very complex vector shapes, this will probably not be the best approach.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: Note: The codice_1 routine above cannot blindly set the colour value to the percent calculated. It must add the new value to the existing value at that location up to a maximum of 1. Otherwise, the brightness of each pixel will be equal to the darkest value calculated in time for that location which produces a very bad result. For example, if one point sets a brightness level of 0.90 for a given pixel and another point calculated later barely touches that pixel and has a brightness of 0.05, the final value set for that pixel should be 0.95, not 0.05.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: For more sophisticated shapes, the algorithm may be generalized as rendering the shape to a pixel grid with higher resolution than the target display surface (usually a multiple that is a power of 2 to reduce distortion), then using bicubic interpolation to determine the average intensity of each real pixel on the display surface.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: In this approach, the ideal image is regarded as a "signal". The image displayed on the screen is taken as samples, at each ("x,y") pixel position, of a filtered version of the signal. Ideally, one would understand how the human brain would process the original signal, and provide an on-screen image that will yield the most similar response by the brain.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: The most widely accepted analytic tool for such problems is the Fourier transform; this decomposes a signal into basis functions of different frequencies, known as frequency components, and gives us the amplitude of each frequency component in the signal. The waves are of the form:


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: where "j" and "k" are arbitrary non-negative integers. There are also frequency components involving the sine functions in one or both dimensions, but for the purpose of this discussion, the cosine will suffice.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: The numbers "j" and "k" together are the "frequency" of the component: "j" is the frequency in the "x" direction, and "k" is the frequency in the "y" direction.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: The goal of an anti-aliasing filter is to greatly reduce frequencies above a certain limit, known as the Nyquist frequency, so that the signal will be accurately represented by its samples, or nearly so, in accordance with the sampling theorem; there are many different choices of detailed algorithm, with different filter transfer functions. Current knowledge of human visual perception is not sufficient, in general, to say what approach will look best.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: The previous discussion assumes that the rectangular mesh sampling is the dominant part of the problem. The filter usually considered optimal is not rotationally symmetrical, as shown in this first figure; this is because the data is sampled on a square lattice, not using a continuous image. This sampling pattern is the justification for doing signal processing along each axis, as it is traditionally done on one dimensional data. Lanczos resampling is based on convolution of the data with a discrete representation of the sinc function.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: If the resolution is not limited by the rectangular sampling rate of either the source or target image, then one should ideally use rotationally symmetrical filter or interpolation functions, as though the data were a two dimensional function of continuous x and y. The sinc function of the radius has too long a tail to make a good filter (it is not even square-integrable). A more appropriate analog to the one-dimensional sinc is the two-dimensional Airy disc amplitude, the 2D Fourier transform of a circular region in 2D frequency space, as opposed to a square region.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: One might consider a Gaussian plus enough of its second derivative to flatten the top (in the frequency domain) or sharpen it up (in the spatial domain), as shown. Functions based on the Gaussian function are natural choices, because convolution with a Gaussian gives another Gaussian whether applied to x and y or to the radius. Similarly to wavelets, another of its properties is that it is halfway between being localized in the configuration (x and y) and in the spectral (j and k) representation. As an interpolation function, a Gaussian alone seems too spread out to preserve the maximum possible detail, and thus the second derivative is added.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: As an example, when printing a photographic negative with plentiful processing capability and on a printer with a hexagonal pattern, there is no reason to use sinc function interpolation. Such interpolation would treat diagonal lines differently from horizontal and vertical lines, which is like a weak form of aliasing.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: There are only a handful of primitives used at the lowest level in a real-time rendering engine (either software or hardware accelerated). These include "points", "lines" and "triangles". If one is to draw such a primitive in white against a black background, it is possible to design such a primitive to have fuzzy edges, achieving some sort of anti-aliasing. However, this approach has difficulty dealing with adjacent primitives (such as triangles that share an edge).


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: To approximate the uniform averaging algorithm, one may use an extra buffer for sub-pixel data. The initial (and least memory-hungry) approach used 16 extra bits per pixel, in a 4 × 4 grid. If one renders the primitives in a careful order, such as front-to-back, it is possible to create a reasonable image.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: Since this requires that the primitives be in some order, and hence interacts poorly with an application programming interface such as OpenGL, the latest methods simply have two or more full sub-pixels per pixel, including full color information for each sub-pixel. Some information may be shared between the sub-pixels (such as the Z-buffer.)


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: There is also an approach specialised for texture mapping called mipmapping, which works by creating lower resolution, pre-filtered versions of the texture map. When rendering the image, the appropriate-resolution mipmap is chosen and hence the texture pixels (texels) are already filtered when they arrive on the screen. Mipmapping is generally combined with various forms of texture filtering in order to improve the final result.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: Because fractals have unlimited detail and no noise other than arithmetic round-off error, they illustrate aliasing more clearly than do photographs or other measured data. The escape times, which are converted to colours at the exact centres of the pixels, go to infinity at the border of the set, so colours from centres near borders are unpredictable, due to aliasing. This example has edges in about half of its pixels, so it shows much aliasing. The first image is uploaded at its original sampling rate. (Since most modern software anti-aliases, one may have to download the full-size version to see all of the aliasing.) The second image is calculated at five times the sampling rate and down-sampled with anti-aliasing. Assuming that one would really like something like the average colour over each pixel, this one is getting closer. It is clearly more orderly than the first.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: It happens that, in this case, there is additional information that can be used. By re-calculating with a "distance estimator" algorithm, points were identified that are very close to the edge of the set, so that unusually fine detail is aliased in from the rapidly changing escape times near the edge of the set. The colours derived from these calculated points have been identified as unusually unrepresentative of their pixels. The set changes more rapidly there, so a single point sample is less representative of the whole pixel. Those points were replaced, in the third image, by interpolating the points around them. This reduces the noisiness of the image but has the side effect of brightening the colours. So this image is not exactly the same that would be obtained with an even larger set of calculated points. To show what was discarded, the rejected points, blended into a grey background, are shown in the fourth image.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: Finally, "Budding Turbines" is so regular that systematic (Moiré) aliasing can clearly be seen near the main "turbine axis" when it is downsized by taking the nearest pixel. The aliasing in the first image appears random because it comes from all levels of detail, below the pixel size. When the lower level aliasing is suppressed, to make the third image and then that is down-sampled once more, without anti-aliasing, to make the fifth image, the order on the scale of the third image appears as systematic aliasing in the fifth image.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: Super sampling anti-aliasing (SSAA), also called full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA), is used to avoid aliasing (or "jaggies") on full-screen images. SSAA was the first type of anti-aliasing available with early video cards. But due to its tremendous computational cost and the advent of multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA) support on GPUs, it is no longer widely used in real time applications. MSAA provides somewhat lower graphic quality, but also tremendous savings in computational power.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: The resulting image of SSAA may seem softer, and should also appear more realistic. However, while useful for photo-like images, a simple anti-aliasing approach (such as super-sampling and then averaging) may actually worsen the appearance of some types of line art or diagrams (making the image appear fuzzy), especially where most lines are horizontal or vertical. In these cases, a prior grid-fitting step may be useful (see hinting).


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: In general, super-sampling is a technique of collecting data points at a greater resolution (usually by a power of two) than the final data resolution. These data points are then combined (down-sampled) to the desired resolution, often just by a simple average. The combined data points have less visible aliasing artifacts (or moiré patterns).


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: Full-scene anti-aliasing by super-sampling usually means that each full frame is rendered at double (2x) or quadruple (4x) the display resolution, and then down-sampled to match the display resolution. Thus, a 2x FSAA would render 4 super-sampled pixels for each single pixel of each frame. Rendering at larger resolutions will produce better results; however, more processor power is needed, which can degrade performance and frame rate. Sometimes FSAA is implemented in hardware in such a way that a graphical application is unaware the images are being super-sampled and then down-sampled before being displayed.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: A graphics rendering system creates an image based on objects constructed of polygonal primitives; the aliasing effects in the image can be reduced by applying an anti-aliasing scheme only to the areas of the image representing silhouette edges of the objects. The silhouette edges are anti-aliased by creating anti-aliasing primitives which vary in opacity. These anti-aliasing primitives are joined to the silhouetted edges, and create a region in the image where the objects appear to blend into the background. The method has some important advantages over classical methods based on the accumulation buffer since it generates full-scene anti-aliasing in only two passes and does not require the use of additional memory required by the accumulation buffer. Object-based anti-aliasing was first developed at Silicon Graphics for their Indy workstation.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: Digital images are usually stored in a gamma-compressed format, but most optical anti-aliasing filters are linear. So to down-sample an image in a way that would match optical blurring, one should first convert it to a linear format, then apply the anti-aliasing filter, and finally convert it back to a gamma compressed format. Using linear arithmetic on a gamma-compressed image results in values which are slightly different from the ideal filter. This error is larger when dealing with high contrast areas, causing high contrast areas to become dimmer: bright details (such as a cat's whiskers) become visually thinner, and dark details (such as tree branches) become thicker, relative to the optically anti-aliased image. Each pixel is individually distorted, meaning outlines become unsmooth after anti-aliasing. Because the conversion to and from a linear format greatly slows down the process, and because the differences are usually subtle, most image editing software, including Final Cut Pro and Adobe Photoshop, process images in the gamma-compressed domain.


title: Spatial anti-aliasing

text: Most modern GPUs support storing textures in memory in sRGB format, and can perform transformation to linear space and back transparently, with essentially no loss in performance.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: The Haunted is a Swedish heavy metal band from Gothenburg, formed in 1996. The original members were Anders and Jonas Björler, Peter Dolving, Adrian Erlandsson and Patrik Jensen. Both of the Björler brothers and Erlandsson were members of the seminal melodic death metal band At the Gates, a pioneering force in the Swedish death metal scene.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: On 27 July 1996, Patrik Jensen co-created the band with Adrian Erlandsson, who had just become an ex-member of his former band, At the Gates, due to the band's split the day before. They had made their demo, called "Demo '97", in 1997.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: The band were signed to Earache Records and subsequently released their first album, the self-titled debut "The Haunted" in 1998. The album resulted in The Haunted being praised as "Newcomer of the Year" by several magazines, and the album being called "Album of the Year" by Terrorizer Magazine. The Haunted made a respectable live reputation staging the Swedish metal scene, as well the international scene, touring the UK with Napalm Death.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: After the release of this album, Peter Dolving and Adrian Erlandsson both left the band in 1999, the former focusing on a solo career and the latter joining Cradle of Filth. Their replacements were Marco Aro and Per Möller Jensen. The band began to record their second album shortly afterwards.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: Their second album, "Made Me Do It", released in 2000, was more melodic and resembled the Gothenburg style (with bands such as At the Gates, etc.) more than old-school thrash metal that was used on "The Haunted". It is originally called "Made Me Do It", but the idea is for the band name to be included in the title. ""The Haunted Made Me Do It"" topped CMJ Loud Rock Radio Chart for four weeks, and won a Swedish Grammy for "Best Hard Rock Album". The album was followed by European tours with Entombed and Nile, The Crown in the UK, and In Flames in Japan. The Haunted played festivals such as "2000 Decibel", Hultsfred (both in Sweden), Graspop (Belgium), and Wacken Open Air (Germany). The band subsequently released their first live album - "Live Rounds in Tokyo".


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: In August 2001, guitarist/songwriter Anders Björler left the band and he was temporarily replaced by Marcus Sunesson of The Crown for The Haunted's headlining tour; in less than a year Björler returned to the band. This meant that he could appear on the third studio album.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: The next album was released in February 2003 and was titled "One Kill Wonder". The Haunted broke their own record being listed at number one on CMJ Loud Rock Radio Chart in five weeks. Alternative Press hailed The Haunted as one of metal's 25 most important bands. The song "D.O.A.", from this album, became available for download in March 2008 for the video game Rock Band, on the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Marketplace, and the PlayStation 3's PlayStation Network. Another song from the same album, "Shadow World", was announced as a future download.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: "One Kill Wonder" resulted in the band dominating album charts all over the world, and their first tours to Australia and South Africa, another tour to Japan, and a second Grammy. After another tour to Scandinavia, North America, United Kingdom and Europe in late 2003, the sudden departure of Marco Aro came as a shock. Though, this opened a new chance of building up a reunion with former vocalist Peter Dolving.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: Their first album with Peter Dolving back at the helm (and signed to a new deal with Century Media), was entitled "Revolver". The new album was released in October 2004 and the name was to convey the evolution of the band and the music it now played as a whole. "Revolver" was met with a fair amount of fan support and critical acclaim, and the band toured the world extensively in support of it, including a second stage spot at Ozzfest 2005. On 2 February 2005, Marco Aro played his last show in Stockholm, Sweden but as a guest singer. In 2006, the band performed on the Extreme The Dojo vol.15 tour in Japan with Exodus and Nile, while Edge of Spirit opened for them.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: The Haunted's fifth studio album, "The Dead Eye", was released on 30 October 2006 in Europe and was again a success, showing a more sinister side to Dolving's lyrics and a more technical, haunting musical approach. It was released in the US on 31 October 2006. They later toured Europe and toured with Dark Tranquillity, Into Eternity, and Scar Symmetry for the North America "Metal For The Masses" tour. They later toured Europe for the "Cursed Earth" tour with bands like Wolf, Municipal Waste, and Lyzanxia before taking a break in order to later return to play further tours and some shows in Russia.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: Their sixth studio album, Versus, was released on 17 September 2008 in Sweden, 19–24 September in the rest of Europe, and 14 October in the US. In 2009 the band released a compilation album Warning Shots. In April 2010, the band released a live CD called "Road Kill", and they supported heavy metal legends Slayer on their August 2010 tour. The band was also confirmed as being part of the soundtrack for Namco Bandai Games' 2010 remake of Splatterhouse.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: In April 2010, Dolving revealed that they had started writing new material, and the recording of a seventh album started that same fall. On 30 December, the band announced that the upcoming album was to be called "Unseen" and was to be released in March 2011.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: The first sneak preview of the album was on 22 January 2011, when the band performed the song "No Ghost" on the P3 Guld Gala, broadcast live on TV and radio throughout Sweden.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: However, on 29 February 2012, Peter Dolving quit the band for the second time. On 1 March 2012, The Haunted announced vocalist auditions via their Facebook page:


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: On 16 October 2012 two more members of the band, guitarist Anders Björler and drummer Per Möller Jensen also quit, leaving the band's future up in the air. Jonas announced on The Band's Facebook that both he and Patrik were still deeply committed to the band, but acknowledged that now two additional band members had left, they were naturally uncertain of the band's future. Unsurprisingly, a hiatus followed this turbulent series of events, and fans waited nervously to see what would transpire.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: Patrik Jensen and Jonas Björler had a discussion at Jonas' 40th birthday party about not letting The Haunted disband. When Jensen asked Björler who should be the new vocalist in the band, Björler could only think of former member, Marco Aro. A few days later Jensen phoned Aro asking him to rejoin The Haunted. Aro had missed being in the band and was tempted to rejoin, but he was hesitant at first because he was not interested in returning to the hectic touring he had done with The Haunted in his past stint as vocalist. The Haunted had done a lot of touring for almost a decade straight after Aro left, reducing the band's desire to continue with such scheduling going forward. More hesitation came because Aro had struggled with drug addiction during his time with the band, causing problems with his family, which he didn't want to risk a reoccurrence of. He indicated that he needed to discuss rejoining the band with his family.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: Aro was also in the band The Resistance and didn't want to have conflicting schedules with both bands, so he had to have a discussion with The Resistance as well. Aro told Jensen he'd give him a response two weeks later. By then, the band had shown him the a breakdown of future tours, which encouraged Aro to rejoin The Haunted. Before publicly revealing information of the band's new lineup, Aro stated only that there was "good news coming from the band". His picture was in a silhouette on the band's official Facebook the day before the band announced a new line-up.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: Original drummer Adrian Erlandsson now returned to the band also, and Ola Englund from Six Feet Under was brought in as the band's new lead guitarist. The band then began writing for an EP titled "Eye of the Storm," which was released on 20 January 2014 in Europe and 21 January 2014 in North America. The band had already been rehearsing before the announcement of the new lineup, and their first live performance followed at the 70000 Tons of Metal which set sail 27–31 January 2014.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: On 1 July 2014, it was announced that their new album would be titled "Exit Wounds", with the release date of 25 August 2014 in Europe and 2 September 2014 in North America. The track listing and the album cover were revealed on the same day.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: On 10 May 2017, Century Media Records announced the band's ninth studio album would be entitled "Strength in Numbers" and it was subsequently released worldwide on 25 August 2017.


title: The Haunted (Swedish band)

text: On 7 August 2022, Ola announced on his Youtube channel that The Haunted were preparing to write a new album.


title: Catacombe dei Cappuccini

text: The Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo (also Catacombe dei Cappuccini or Catacombs of the Capuchins) are burial catacombs in Palermo, Sicily, southern Italy. Today they provide a somewhat macabre tourist attraction as well as an extraordinary historical record.


title: Catacombe dei Cappuccini

text: Palermo's Capuchin monastery outgrew its original cemetery in the 16th century and monks began to excavate crypts below it. In 1599 they mummified one of their number, the recently-deceased brother Silvestro of Gubbio, and placed him in the catacombs.


title: Catacombe dei Cappuccini

text: Bodies were dehydrated on racks of ceramic pipes in the catacombs and sometimes later washed with vinegar. Some bodies were embalmed and others were enclosed in sealed glass cabinets. Friars were preserved with their everyday clothing and sometimes with ropes they had worn in penance.


title: Catacombe dei Cappuccini

text: Initially the catacombs were intended only for deceased friars. However, in later centuries it became a status symbol to be entombed in the Capuchin catacombs. In their wills, local luminaries would ask to be preserved in certain clothes, or even have their clothes changed at regular intervals. Priests wore their clerical vestments, while others were clothed according to contemporary fashion. Relatives would visit to pray for the deceased and to maintain the body in presentable condition.


title: Catacombe dei Cappuccini

text: The catacombs were maintained through donations from the relatives of the deceased. Each new body was placed in a temporary niche and later placed into a more permanent location. So long as contributions continued, the body remained in its proper place but if relatives stopped sending money, the body was put aside on a shelf until they resumed payments.


title: Catacombe dei Cappuccini

text: In 1871 Brother Riccardo was the last friar interred in the catacombs, but other famous people were interred after that. The catacombs were officially closed in 1880 but tourists continued to visit. The last burials are from the 1920s and 1930s. Among the final interments was Rosalia Lombardo, then nearly two years old, whose body remains remarkably intact, preserved with a procedure performed by Professor Alfredo Salafia. His process included formalin to kill bacteria, alcohol to dry the body, glycerin to keep it from over drying, salicylic acid to kill fungi, and the most important ingredients, zinc salts (zinc sulfate and zinc chloride) to give the body rigidity. The formula is one part glycerin, one part formalin saturated with both zinc salts, and one part of an alcohol solution saturated with salicylic acid. The final burial was that of Giovanni Licata di Baucina, the count of Isnello, in 1939.


title: Catacombe dei Cappuccini

text: The catacombs contain about 8,000 corpses and 1,252 mummies (as stated by last census made by EURAC in 2011) that line the walls. The halls are divided by category: men, women, virgins, children, priests, monks, and professionals. Some bodies are better preserved than others. Some are set in poses; for example, two children are sitting together in a rocking chair. The coffins were accessible to the families of the deceased so that on certain days the family, including the deceased, could join their hands in prayer.


title: Catacombe dei Cappuccini

text: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is sometimes said to be interred the catacombs, but he is buried in the cemetery next to them.


title: Catacombe dei Cappuccini

text: The Sicily Mummy Project was created in 2007 to study the mummies and to create profiles on those who were mummified. The project is led by anthropologist Dario Piombino-Mascali of the Department of Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity in Palermo, and is backed by the European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano The mummies are X-Rayed and CT scanned to collect information about them, along with other anthropological and paleopathological techniques to confirm their age and gender. Piombino-Mascali credits the program with re-opening discussion about death in Sicily;


title: Catacombe dei Cappuccini

text: Forensic biologist Mark Benecke identified several insects that shed light on the mummification process.


title: Catacombe dei Cappuccini

text: The catacombs are open to the public. Photography inside is officially prohibited, which prominent signs make clear to visitors. However, some bodies have been shown on film in Francesco Rosi's "Cadaveri Eccellenti" ("Illustrious Corpses"), and television programmes such as the Channel 4 series "Coach Trip", BBC TV series "The Human Body" in 1998, "", "Ghosthunting With Paul O'Grady and Friends" on ITV2 in 2008 and The Learning Channel in 2000. Iron grills have been installed to prevent tourists tampering or posing with the corpses.


title: Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan

text: Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan (; born 30 April 1972) is the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the United Arab Emirates. He is a son of the founder of the United Arab Emirates, Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. In 2020, he was a signatory of the Abraham Accords on behalf of the UAE.


title: Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan

text: Abdullah bin Zayed was born in Abu Dhabi on 30 April 1972. He holds a degree in political science from UAE University. He is married to Sheikha Alyazia bint Saif Al Nahyan, who became an FAO Goodwill Ambassador extraordinary in 2010, and has five children: Fatima, Mohammad, Zayed, Saif and Theyab.


title: Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan

text: Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the United Arab Emirates on 9 February 2006.


title: Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan

text: In 2017, leaked emails highlighted that Abdullah bin Zayed maintained close contacts with Tony Blair, who was being funded by the UAE as the Middle East peace envoy. Blair held a number of official meetings with the UAE Foreign Minister. The emails also revealed that Abdullah bin Zayed was one of the UAE royals who bankrolled the envoy. In 2011, Sheikh Abdullah's office separately sent $2 million to Blair through Windrush Ventures, which channeled money for Tony Blair's commercial advisory work. The UAE Foreign Ministry also transferred $12 million to Windrush for Blair consultancy work in Colombia, Vietnam and Mongolia.


title: Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan

text: In August 2017, Sheikh Abdullah urged Iran and Turkey to end what the UAE called their "colonial" actions in Syria, signaling unease about diminishing Gulf Arab influence in the war, and calling "the exit of those parties trying to reduce the sovereignty of the Syrian state." He added that "if Iran and Turkey continue the same historical, colonial and competitive behavior and perspectives between them in Arab affairs, we will continue in this situation not just in Syria today but tomorrow in some other country."


title: Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan

text: On 14 February 2019, Sheikh Abdullah said that Israel was justified in attacking Iranian targets in Syria.


title: Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan

text: On 15 September 2020, Sheikh Abdullah signed the official Israel–United Arab Emirates peace agreement in a ceremony at the White House in Washington, D.C., US.


title: Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan

text: In February 2022, the UAE abstained in a UN Security Council vote to condemn Russia for invading Ukraine. Sheikh Abdullah had a call with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken prior to the UN Security Council vote. In the phone call, Blinken spoke of the "importance of building a strong international response to support Ukrainian sovereignty through the UN Security Council." The Emirati readout of the phone call did not include Blinken's statement.


title: Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan

text: Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed is a member of the UAE's National Security Council, Deputy Chairman of the UAE's Permanent Committee on Borders, Chairman of the National Media Council, chairman of the Board of Directors of the Emirates Foundation for Youth Development, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development (ADFD) and Board Member of the National Defense College.


title: Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan

text: Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed served as Minister of Information and Culture from 1997 to 2006. Previously, he served as Chairman of Emirates Media Incorporated, Chairman of the UAE Football Association (1993–2001), and as the Under Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Culture from 1995 to 1997.


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: Shirley Anne Field (born Shirley Broomfield; 27 June 1938) is an English actress who has performed on stage, film and television since 1955, prominent during the British New Wave.


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: Broomfield was born in Forest Gate, Essex (now in the London Borough of Newham). She was the third of four children, with two elder sisters and a younger brother, Earnest "Guy" Broomfield (c. 1939–1999). Her brother was murdered, in 1999, by Harry Dalsey, the son of Adrian Dalsey.


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: At the age of six, Shirley was placed in the National Children's Home at Edgworth, near Bolton, Lancashire and four years later was moved to another children's home in Blackburn, where she attended Blakey Moor School for Girls. She subsequently returned to Edgworth until she was 15, when she moved to a children's home hostel in London, training as a typist while still attending school.


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: After a course at the Lucie Clayton School and Model Agency, she became a photographic model for pin-up magazines like "Reveille" and "Titbits". She was subsequently spotted by Bill Watts, who ran a theatrical agency and obtained for her roles in late 1950s British films, usually uncredited.


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: Her first appearance in a film was as an extra in "Simon and Laura" (1955). She had small parts in "All for Mary" (1955), "Lost" (1956), "Yield to the Night" (1956) (directed by J. Lee Thompson), "It's Never Too Late" (1956), "It's a Wonderful World" (1956), "The Weapon" (1956), "Loser Takes All" (1956), "The Silken Affair" (1956), "Dry Rot" (1956), "The Good Companions" (1957) (again for Thompson), "Seven Thunders" (1957), and "The Flesh Is Weak" (1957). She was in episodes of "The New Adventures of Martin Kane" (1957) and "International Detective".


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: Field's first sizeable film role was in "Horrors of the Black Museum" (1959). She had minor parts in "Once More, with Feeling!" (1960) and "And the Same to You" (1960). Field had a larger role in the controversial "Peeping Tom" (1960). She appeared on stage in "The Lily White Boys" with Albert Finney.


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: In 1960, Field's breakthrough came when she was chosen by Tony Richardson to play the role of model Tina Lapford in "The Entertainer" (1960), starring Laurence Olivier, distributed by Bryanston Films. Half a century later, she clarified that she did not owe her break to Olivier: "It was Tony Richardson I owe it all to."


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: Field had a supporting role in "Beat Girl" (1960), then appeared in probably her best known role as Doreen, the would-be girlfriend of rebellious Arthur Seaton (played by Albert Finney), in the New Wave film for Bryanston, "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" (1960). Director, Karel Reisz, described her as "difficult to play with". Co-star Finney had previously had a small role in "The Entertainer". The film was a huge hit.


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: Field starred alongside Kenneth More in "Man in the Moon" (1960). With those three big film starring roles in 1960, she became one of the very few actors ever to have their name above the titles in all the major cinemas around Leicester Square simultaneously.


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: Although offered a role in "A Kind of Loving" (1962), Field turned it down to play the female lead in a Hollywood financed film, "The War Lover" (1962), with Steve McQueen. Four decades later, she admitted that the shoot was not ideal:


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: For Hammer films, Field starred in "The Damned" (1963), directed by Joseph Losey. She went to Hollywood to play the female lead in an epic directed by J. Lee Thompson, "Kings of the Sun" (1963). Thompson had her under personal contract at this stage. She says she turned down roles in a James Bond movie and an Elvis Presley movie.


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: Field went to Italy to appear in "The Wedding March" (1966), then back in England made "Doctor in Clover" (1966) and "Alfie" (1966). She had a supporting role in "Hell Is Empty" (1967).


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: Field starred in "With Love in Mind" (1970) and "A Touch of the Other" (1970), then made "House of the Living Dead" (1974).


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: By the late 1970s Field was more commonly seen on TV, in shows such as "Centre Play", "Shoestring", "Buccaneer", "Never the Twain" and a long run on "Santa Barbara" as well as TV movies like "Two by Forsyth". She had a notable role in films like "My Beautiful Laundrette" (1985), "Shag" (1989), "Getting It Right" (1989), "The Rachel Papers" (1989), "Hear My Song" (1991), "UFO" (1993), "Taking Liberty" (1993), "Loving Deadly" (1994), and "At Risk" (1994).


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: Later TV included "" (1993), "Murder She Wrote", "Lady Chatterly", "Rumble", "Bramwell", "Barbara", "Madson", "Dalziel and Pascoe", "The Bill", "Where the Heart Is", "Waking the Dead", "Monarch of the Glen", "Last of the Summer Wine", "Doctors". Her most recent films are "The Kid", "The Power of Three" and "Beautiful Relics".


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: On 7 July 1967, Field married the aristocratic RAF pilot and racing driver Charles Crichton-Stuart (1939–2001). They had a daughter, Nicola Crichton-Stuart, who was born in 1969. The marriage ended in divorce during the late 1970s. Her autobiography, "A Time for Love", was published in 1991.


title: Shirley Anne Field

text: On 14 November 1993, Field appeared on BBC Radio 4's "Desert Island Discs", talking to Sue Lawley about her upbringing in different children's homes in Northern England and her success as an actress in the 1960s. She also reminisced about her friendship with John F. Kennedy and an ill-fated date with Frank Sinatra. Her record choices included Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major and pieces by Rachmaninov, Elvis Presley and the Carpenters. In the September 2009 issue of "Cinema Retro", there was a long interview with Field, where she candidly talked about her childhood and the making of "Peeping Tom", "The Entertainer", "Beat Girl" and "The War Lover".


title: UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs. Rodríguez

text: UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs. Rodríguez (also known as UFC Fight Night 197, UFC Vegas 42 and UFC on ESPN+ 55) was a mixed martial arts event produced by the Ultimate Fighting Championship that took place on November 13, 2021 at the UFC Apex facility in Enterprise, Nevada, part of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Area, United States.


title: UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs. Rodríguez

text: On October 19, it was announced that the UFC sent a memo to fighters and their staff regarding policy changes to U.S. international travel requirements. Starting on November 8, foreign individuals looking to travel to the United States will need to be fully vaccinated with, and provide proof of, one of seven World Health Organization approved vaccines. They will also need a negative COVID-19 test from a 72-hour period prior to travel. The policy also applies to those crossing from Canada or Mexico, or those coming by ship. This was the first event under such requirement.


title: UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs. Rodríguez

text: A featherweight bout between former UFC Featherweight Champion Max Holloway and featherweight winner Yair Rodríguez served as the event headliner. The pairing was previously scheduled to headline , but Holloway was pulled from the bout during the weeks leading up to that event due to injury.


title: UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs. Rodríguez

text: A light heavyweight bout between Kennedy Nzechukwu and Da Un Jung was originally expected to take place at , but it was pushed back to this event due to unknown reasons.


title: UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs. Rodríguez

text: A women's flyweight bout between former UFC Women's Flyweight Championship challenger Jessica Eye and Andrea Lee was scheduled for the event. However, Eye pulled out of the bout in mid-October citing illness and was replaced by Cynthia Calvillo.


title: UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs. Rodríguez

text: Two middleweight bouts between Kevin Holland and Kyle Daukaus, as well as Eryk Anders and Roman Dolidze were scheduled for the event. However, Holland withdrew from his bout due to injury, and Anders withdrew from the event for undisclosed reasons. Daukaus and Dolidze were then scheduled to face each other instead. In turn, the bout was scrapped due to COVID-19 protocols related to Dolidze’s camp.


title: UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs. Rodríguez

text: A lightweight bout between Marc Diakiese and Rafael Alves was rescheduled for the event. The pair was previously expected to meet at , but Alves pulled out of the fight in mid-August due to undisclosed reasons and the bout was scrapped.


title: UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs. Rodríguez

text: A featherweight bout between Lando Vannata and Tucker Lutz was expected to take place at this event. However, Lutz was pulled from the bout and instead scheduled to face Pat Sabatini at .


title: UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs. Rodríguez

text: Former interim UFC Light Heavyweight Championship challenger Ovince Saint Preux was expected to face Philipe Lins in a light heavyweight bout at the event. In turn, Saint Preux withdrew from the fight for undisclosed reasons and the bout was cancelled.


title: UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs. Rodríguez

text: A light heavyweight bout between Danilo Marques and Jailton Almeida was scheduled for this event. However, the bout was rescheduled due to Danilo getting injured and it is now expected to take place at UFC Fight Night 201.


title: UFC Fight Night: Holloway vs. Rodríguez

text: At the weigh-ins, two fighters missed weight for their respective bouts. Joel Álvarez weighed in at 157.5 pounds, one and a half pounds over the lightweight non-title fight limit. Liana Jojua weighed in at 128.5 pounds, two and a half pounds over the women's flyweight non-title fight limit. Both bouts proceeded at catchweight with Álvarez and Jojua each fined 30% of their purses, which went to their opponents Thiago Moisés and Cortney Casey respectively.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: Blanche of Castile (; 4 March 1188 – 27 November 1252) was Queen of France by marriage to Louis VIII. She acted as regent twice during the reign of her son, Louis IX: during his minority from 1226 until 1234, and during his absence from 1248 until 1252. She was born in Palencia, Spain, in 1188, the third daughter of Alfonso VIII, King of Castile, and Eleanor of England, sister of King Richard I of England and King John of England.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: In her youth, she visited the Abbey of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas, founded by her parents, several times. In consequence of the Treaty of Le Goulet between Philip Augustus and John of England, Blanche's sister, Urraca, was betrothed to Philip's son, Louis. After meeting the two sisters, their grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine (who had been a queen consort of France herself) judged that Blanche's personality was more fit to fulfil the role. In the spring of 1200, Eleanor crossed the Pyrenees with her and brought her to France instead.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: Eleanor of Aquitaine judged that Urraca, Blanche's sister, was more beautiful than Blanche, although Catherine Hanley states we have no knowledge about what Blanche looked like.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: On 22 May 1200, the marriage treaty was finally signed. King John ceded, along with his niece Blanche, the fiefs of Issoudun and Graçay, together with those that André de Chauvigny, lord of Châteauroux, held in Berry, of the English crown. The marriage was celebrated the next day at Port-Mort on the right bank of the Seine, in John's domains, as those of Philip lay under an interdict. Blanche was twelve years of age, and Louis was only a year older, so the marriage had to wait to be consummated a few years later. Blanche bore her first child in 1205.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: During the English barons' rebellion of 1215–16 against King John, it was Blanche's English ancestry as granddaughter to Henry II that led to Louis being offered the throne of England as Louis I. However, with the death of John in October 1216, the barons changed their allegiance to John's son, the nine-year-old Henry.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: Louis continued to claim the English crown in her right, only to find a united nation against him. Philip Augustus refused to help his son, and Blanche was his sole support. Blanche raised money from her father-in-law by threatening to put up her children as hostages. She established herself at Calais and organized two fleets, one of which was commanded by Eustace the Monk, and an army under Robert of Courtenay. With French forces defeated at Lincoln in May 1217 and then routed on their way back to their London stronghold, Louis desperately needed the reinforcements from France. On 24 August, the English fleet destroyed the French fleet carrying those reinforcements off Sandwich and Louis was forced to sue for peace.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: Philip died in July 1223, and Louis VIII and Blanche were crowned on August 6. Upon Louis' death in November 1226 from dysentery, he left Blanche, by then 38, regent and guardian of his children. Of her twelve or thirteen children, six had died, and Louis, the heir — afterwards the sainted Louis IX — was but twelve years old. She had him crowned within a month of his father's death in Reims and forced reluctant barons to swear allegiance to him. The situation was critical, since Louis VIII had died without having completely subdued his southern nobles. The king's minority made the Capetian domains even more vulnerable. To gain support, she released Ferdinand, Count of Flanders, who had been in captivity since the Battle of Bouvines. She ceded land and castles to Philip I, Count of Boulogne, son of King Philip II of France and his controversial wife, Agnes of Merania.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: Several key barons, led by Peter Mauclerc, refused to recognize the coronation of the young king. Shortly after the coronation, Blanche and Louis were traveling south of Paris and nearly captured. Blanche appealed to the people of Paris to protect their king. The citizens lined the roads and protected him as he returned.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: Helped by Theobald IV of Champagne and the papal legate to France, Romano Bonaventura, she organized an army. Its sudden appearance brought the nobles momentarily to a halt. Twice more did Blanche have to muster an army to protect Capetian interests against rebellious nobles and Henry III of England. Blanche organized a surprise attack in the winter. In January 1229, she led her forces to attack Mauclerc and force him to recognize the king. She accompanied the army herself and helped collect wood to keep the soldiers warm. Not everyone was happy with her administration. Her enemies called her “Dame Hersent” (the wolf in the "Roman de Renart")


title: Blanche of Castile

text: In 1229, she was responsible for the Treaty of Paris, in which Raymond VII, Count of Toulouse, submitted to Louis. By the terms of the agreement, his daughter and heir, Joan, married Blanche's son, Alphonse, and the county could only pass to his heirs. He gave up all the lands conquered by Simon de Montfort to the crown of France. It also meant the end of the Albigensian Crusade.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: To prevent Henry III of England from gaining more French lands through marriage, Blanche denied him the first two brides he sought. In 1226, he sought to marry Yolande of Brittany, Mauclerc's daughter. Blanche instead forced her father to give Yolande to Blanche's son John. When Henry became engaged to Joan, Countess of Ponthieu, Blanche lobbied the Pope to deny the marriage based on consanguinity, denying the dispensation Henry sought.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: In 1230, Henry III came to invade France. At the cost of some of the crown's influence in Poitou, Blanche managed to keep the English Queen mother Isabella, Countess of Angoulême, and her second husband, Hugh X of Lusignan, from supporting the English side. However, Mauclerc did support the English and Brittany rebelled against the crown in 1230. Originally, the English landed in Brittany with 275 knights, men at arms, and barons to meet his ally Peter I, Duke of Brittany. The campaign began well for Henry III, who probably recruited foot soldiers on the continent as he brought 7,800 marks with him. On the other hand, Blanche's troops were insubordinate to her and refused to serve beyond the 40 day feudal contract; most disbanded after 40 days. Philip I, Count of Boulogne, left the royal forces and proceeded to raid Champagne. Blanche had to chase Philip to try and stop him from raiding the important county, leaving Henry III to proceed without serious resistance.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: Meanwhile, the Norman nobles were also in open rebellion against Blanche. However, instead of marching to help the Norman rebels, he followed the advice of his vassal, advisor, and former regent Hubert de Burgh, 1st Earl of Kent, and marched into Poitou. In any case, it appears that Henry's excursion to Aquitaine was not necessary despite the calls for help by Geoffrey Beauchamp, who probably panicked due to a slight rise in unrest in Aquitaine. Henry besieged Mirabeau and proceeded to Bordeaux, apparently "securing" the south while also losing massive amounts of money and being forced to take loans. What made it worse was that Aquitaine was not in any serious danger of being taken by the French because what remained of the French royal army was trying to quash a rebellion in Champagne, nowhere near Aquitaine.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: Henry's military operation was still not a complete loss. He was able to get money, military engines, and bolts for crossbows along with the militia of La Réole. Henry marched north into Poitou but the gifts which Blanche had sent to Hugh X of Lusignan, Count of La Marche, and Raymond I, Viscount of Thouars, kept them loyal to the French. Although the local lords could not see Henry off, he was either unable or unwilling to commit to a large offensive investment and decided to return to Brittany, where he spent the remainder of his money on feasts. He proceeded to England having accomplished little. He lost money and prestige even if he had not taken significant casualties. Thus the rebellion died out, which helped establish Blanche and Louis as more stable rulers. Henry's failure to make any significant impact with his invasions ultimately discouraged Mauclerc's rebellion, and, by 1234, he was firm in his support of Louis.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: St. Louis owed his realm to his mother and remained under her influence for the duration of her life.


title: Blanche of Castile

text: Louis began to take part in political affairs by declaring his maturity, but Blanche was very influential and powerful in politics and court affairs, and her son did not withhold anything from her. No one dared to criticize the Queen Mother. In 1233, Raymond of Toulouse was starting to chafe under the terms of the treaty of Paris, thus Blanche sent one of her knights, Giles of Flagy, to convince him to cooperate. Blanche heard through troubadours of the beauty, grace, and religious devotion of the daughters of Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Provence, and assigned Giles a second mission to visit Provence. Giles found a much better reception in Provence than in Toulouse. Upon his return to Paris, Blanche decided that a Provençal marriage would suit her son and help keep Toulouse in check. In 1234, Louis married Margaret of Provence, who was the eldest of the four daughters of Ramon, Count of Provence, and Beatrice of Savoy.