My 1985 Chrysler LeBaron GTS, circa 1990
While my primary interest growing up was cars (as well documented in my previous COALs), I had a second interest that was also developing: Computers. This too would become a lifelong interest and eventually, a career.
As I mentioned in my last COAL, my Dad had purchased a small roofing company from his father. As it grew into a not-so-small company, the manual ways of doing payroll, accounting, and correspondence were quickly becoming a hinderance. It was time for the company to get a computer.
Back in the late 70’s, buying a business computer was not nearly as simple as it is today. In the pre-PC era, one typically bought both the hardware and software from the same vendor as part of a package (there were few standards and little to no interoperability). So each vendor had to be evaluated on both their hardware and software offerings.
Much like car shopping, I remember Mom and Dad dragging me around to all the vendors to sample their wares, while I lapped it all up. We hit all the big names: Burroughs, Honeywell, NCR. I can only imagine what these vendors thought about potential customers bringing their 12-year-old computer expert to their dog and pony shows. What we ended up with was a minicomputer from a company so small that few had ever heard of it: Wang Laboratories. Specifically, we got a Wang 2200 SVP, a computer so obscure that even Google Images struggles to come up with a decent photo. The low quality image below was about the best I could find.
Wang 2200. What is sitting on the desk is just a terminal. The actual computer is located under the desk.
In an era when few people were lucky to have timeshare access to a computer and virtually no one owned one, I had almost limitless access to this magical device. It also didn’t hurt that the computer was located in the only room at my Dad’s office with air conditioning, specifically built to house it (well, more like a closet). I devoured the manuals (hand-writing corrections to the many mistakes I found in them) and tried wringing everything I could out of the whopping 32KB of RAM. I remember on more than one occasion standing around waiting for my Mom to finish running payroll so I could start noodling around.
There was really no doubt that I would go into engineering after high school. I just always knew. The real question was what kind of engineering? Dad was a Civil Engineer, so I didn’t want to follow too closely in his footsteps. So it really came down to my two passions: Cars (Mechanical Engineering) and Computers. Since Computer Engineering and Computer Science weren’t really proper fields yet, computers at the time meant electrical engineering. I’ve always been more of a software guy, so the hardware aspects of EE didn’t appeal to me. Plus, my red-green color blindness meant that I would have a hard time with the colored wires and resistors that were the norm of the largely analog electronics that were still being taught back then. Mechanical Engineering it was, then!
But enough about me – Back to the cars. I found myself in the Fall of 1986 enrolled as a freshman at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in their college of engineering. At first, my parents wouldn’t let me keep a car on campus, but they very quickly tired of the four-hour round-trip treks between Delaware and Cleveland to deliver me to and from school, so they eventually let me take the 1981 Plymouth Reliant (covered in a previous COAL) with me to college.
While I was away at college, my parents went through a series of unremarkable new cars and trucks, and eventually it was time to bid farewell to the Reliant, which was getting on in years and miles. It was replaced by an equally unremarkable 1984 Chevrolet Cavalier, a car so unremarkable that I won’t even bother COALing it. Actually, it was remarkable for one thing: It had remarkable amount of mechanical maladies – bad steering rack, bad struts, worn out brakes and tires, and a few other issues as well. By the time Dad got the estimate to repair everything (over $2,000), he wisely decided that the repair costs exceeded the value of the car, essentially making the Cavalier a total loss.
Dad said I could get whatever car I wanted to replace the Cavalier, and gave me a modest budget to work with (about $3000, if I recall correctly). What I really wanted was a 5-speed 2nd generation Honda Accord, but decent (non-rusty) examples were well out of my price range. I was not getting anywhere, when my dad found a 1985 Chrysler LeBaron GTS in my price range. It was only a few years old at the time, but the reason that it was so cheap was that the mileage was sky-high (about 90,000). This may not seem like a lot of miles today when 200K+ mile cars are common, but back in the 80’s this was taking a serious risk. In any case, this wouldn’t be the last time I would take advantage of the extreme depreciation of high mileage vehicles.
The LeBaron GTS wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but the 5-speed transmission and the unusual 5-door hatchback body style made it vaguely import-like (if I squinted hard enough). It had the 2.2 liter turbocharged engine, which promised a modicum of excitement. I knew from my previous experience with the Reliant that the Chrysler 2.2 was as reliable as a blacksmith’s anvil, so the high mileage didn’t really bother me. It was also fully loaded, with power everything, alloy wheels, leather interior (finally!), and a talking, digital dashboard (a door is ajar).
The styling was handsome, with decent proportions and a waterfall grille. I thought it was much better looking than the bullseye grill that it’s platform-mate Dodge Lancer wore. The non-flush side windows were the biggest external clue that it was a derivative of Chryser’s rapidly aging K platform.
Digital dashboard, with 118,000 miles at the time.
I once accidentally left the keys in the ignition when parking in downtown Cleveland. When I came back to where I had parked it, there was only an empty space. It was recovered a few hours later, missing only the factory radio and, randomly, the cargo cover over the hatchback. I took the money for a replacement factory cassette deck and instead applied it towards an in-dash CD player, which was still a rarity at the time, and never failed to impress passengers. It had a removable faceplate (no one is stealing this baby), which you can see it in the dashboard photo above.
1985 LeBaron GTS
On another trip home, a sticky hood latch failed to close tightly and let go while I was driving on a highway. For some reason, this didn’t really phase me, despite the fact that the windshield cracked. Contrary what the Shell Answer Man had led me to believe, there was no gap between the cowl and hood for me to see through. I basically had to stick my head out the window and drive like a dog. Luckily for you I was carrying my camera with me that day, and took the picture below shortly after the incident. Through a bizarre twist of irony, you can just see the Pontiac dealer where Dad bought his 1981 Bonneville years earlier in the background (The building with with the barrel roof).
My Dad surveying the damage
The LeBaron GTS may not have been the car that I wanted, but it definitely turned out to be the car I needed. It was reliable, quick, and gave me a taste for electronic doodads that I still have to this day. So what happened to it? Tune in for my next COAL.
“I was not getting anywhere, when my dad found a 2005 Chrysler LeBaron GTS in my price range.”
Holy typo, batman!
Typo? What typo?
I just fixed it.
Yeah, I didn’t catch the incongruency of an ’05 LeBaron GTS right away, but I was thinking, “wow, how bad are Chrysler residuals that an ’05 LeBaron is more affordable than an ’80s Accord?”
I saw that too. I thought: Wow, I wonder if I can still find one on a lot somewhere…
My dad took me to his office one day circa 1979 and Wang computers and dedicated word processors were everywhere. So cool, you could type things and it would just appear on a video screen, you couldn’t edit out your mistakes, and then print it! Or save it for later editing on 8″ floppy disks, which were *very* floppy. Way better than typewriters….
Just years later those things were already relics.
Early 90’s I used a word processor in college. Still pretty popular then, just before personal computers became ubiquitous. I remember typing out papers on that small green backlit LED screen, then when you printed it would type out each page like a typewriter and you hoped you got the formatting right.
Edit: Got me curious, it was a Brother WP1400D, looked it up and found on YouTube. Thanks for jogging that memory!
We had one of those too–my great-uncle gave it to us as a Christmas present when I was a sophomore in high school (1995 or so). Nifty little upgrade from the typewriter I had been using, and useful as my parents didn’t finally decide to spend for a real PC until Christmas ’97. Ours was the model with a separate monitor though, with amber characters/text. WP-3410 I think.
The typewriter, which was itself a Brother from the early 90’s, was what I used to fill out all my college applications. Bit of a throwback even then.
I got to use a Wang computer at a summer job I had, in the Indiana Dept. of Mental Health, back in 1986.
Annnnnnd I, too, didn’t much enjoy the EE stuff you had to do to get a CS degree in the mid-late 80s. So I switched to mathematics and then cherry picked all the CS classes I was interested in.
I had the Dodge Lancer cousin to this car for 11 years. I’d bought it after having sampled one of my friends Dodge Shadow ES turbo. At the time, I was in a carpool and needed something with four doors, but the four door Shadow was a bit too small. I’ve made mention of it a number of times on this blog, so I won’t go into it again. For me, it was a great car.
One of the label printing companies I worked for in Atlanta *still* had Wang dumb terminals in the early 90’s. We in the graphics department, had just started to use Macs in production at that time. We did our actual work on the Macs, and then had to enter our (timekeeping) activities on the dumb terminal. Being in a roomful of young guys, there were endless jokes about “working on the Wang” etc. You can imagine the rest…
I work at two different facilities as a nurse. At one of these, where I put in quite a bit of hours, we do NOT use computers–we have paper charting. We also have paper medicine administration records. These are printed out on thin cardboard on what I am convinced is some very primitive printer.
It’s entirely possible they are done using some sort of word processor; the characters are comprised of large dots, there is no spell checking, so if someone writes “grion,” instead of “groin,” that’s how it will remain on our charts until the order is discontinued or the patient expires (so for months or years, even).
I am googling right now how paper MARs are printed, and I can find nothing. But the process is that we write orders down on special forms, the carbon copies of which we fax to a pharmacy in Indianopolis (an hour away), which then prints out the primitive cardboard charts and delivers them to us in Bloomington.
This is in 2017, with no plans in the near future to replace this system.
Back in the day – and not too long after the 2200 – Wang made two great levels of computers.
One was the OIS, an office word processor that used a very easy to understand front end. Subsequent word processing software from other vendors borrowed the Wang OIS look and feel and were very successful with it. At one point, when someone said “word processing”, most people thought “Wang OIS”. Multi-Mate software running on the “new” IBM PC was a blatant copy of Wang’s OIS.
The second was the Wang VS. Those of us who programmed Cobol thought of the Wang VS as having all the power of the IBM OS with none of the IBM’s complex disadvantages.
I loved Wang systems and thought they would become the world standard, along with Digital Equipment Corporation’s mini computers.
Clearly, I was wrong.
About both of them.
The bigger and more luxurious K cars like your LeBaron, and the Dodge Dynasty, were available in the NYC Avis fleet and we found them to be quite nice drivers. Of course all of these were automatics and fully loaded, and a bit brougham-ish (I recall dark red pillowy interiors). We preferred these dressed up K cars to the also available Ford Tempo/Topazes and whatever GM cars were in use then.
Fun Sunday morning read – thank you.
I was sure that with your programming background, you’d weigh in!
I had a friend who briefly worked at Wang & we went to its headquarters in Lowell to work on a project for school. Wang Computers was a big deal in Boston in the 80s and the Wang Center is still there.
As for the LeBaron, I always wanted the one w/the pizza-pie alloy wheels, although my subsequent ownership of a 1989 LeBaron GTC coupe satisfied my Chrysler ownership urge.
We had Wang Labs computers at college (University of California, Berserkeley). I’ve never kept track of what happened to the company. Off to Wikipedia!
The Chrysler LeBaron GTS and Dodge Lancer were the first manifestations of the K-Car that got away from the boxiness of the original Relaries (Ariant?). They looked fresh for their time, until what Lee Iacocca derisively called the “potato cars” that were going to flop (Ford Taurus/Mercury Sable) came along and aged everything else. In hindsight the LeBaron GTS/Lancer are still attractive today.
I’ve always been impressed with the level commenters on this site, but man you guys just took it up to a whole other level. 5 different commenters with experience using Wang computers? That’s crazy!
Yes, I remember the 8″ floppy disks, and we made all the requisite Wang jokes.
My aunt and uncle had one of those. Not a bad car. They bought up to that after an Aries. I remember hearing how he flipped out hearing his insurance jumped because his car had a turbo. A 70+ man getting a domestic car with a turbo was a rarity in the 1980s.
Another great piece, Tom. If the hood had done that while I was driving on the interstate… all I’ll say is, quick thinking and acting, Man!
2.2-equipped Chrysler products of the 80’s were also on my shopping list for a while, with their reputation for reliability, good gas mileage, and pep (relative to other four-cylinders) enhancing their appeal to me. This LeBaron GTS bodystyle always looked good to me, but being a teenager, I was looking at Auto Trader for a (two-door) naturally aspirated G-body Daytona/Laser or L-Body Turismo/Duster/Charger.
I also had an aftermarket stereo in my ’88 Mustang with a detachable face plate. That was the “ish” back in the 90’s!
“It also didn’t hurt that the computer was located in the only room in my Dad’s office with air conditioning”
I laughed at that line. Took me back to my high school days of the late 70s working in a supermarket. The main floor, and employee lunch room were air conditioned. The back room and dock area was not. The store installed the first NCR scanner register systems and we got tossed out of our little lunch room to house the main frames.
You’re right about the risk about buying a car in that era with a 100k. Pending cost of repairs put a good number of them on trade in row at the Chrysler dealer I worked at then.
Same here. In the pathology lab where I worked, much of our equipment needed air conditioning to work properly in summer (it was American in those days, and they must have assumed air conditioning was a given) and kept breaking down, but the computer room was the one place that had it. Always cool in there.
Forget what breed of computer we had there, but it stood taller than me, as wide as a double door and had a massive reel-to-reel tape drive on the front.
I started college in 80 and the school was using Wang systems for grade record keeping (I think).
(insert 8″ and Wang joke here)
I owned the exact same car, san Turbo and digital dash.
Not the worst car I ever owned, surprisingly enough.
My department at college got a Wang calculator with a card reader, which allowed the calculator to be “programmed”, about 1970 or earlier, maybe 68 or 69. My memory is fuzzy on that. I do recall using it to process the data for my MS degree. My thesis was less than 20 pages.
Hewlett Packard had a pre-PC based desktop the 125. It used two 8″ floppies in a separate case that alone retailed for, I think about $2,695, but the thing that really dated it was the “Help” key was called “Aids”!
The HP computer I remember from that era was the HP-150, a desktop computer that vaguely resembled the early Macs although it preceded them. Also like the Mac it used 3-1/2″ floppies which were rare in the early ’80s. But its coolest and most futuristic feature was….. a touchscreen! In 1983! HP was decades ahead of the curve here. Although it was a bit primitive – it wasn’t actually touch-sensitive but rather used a series of infrared emitters that surrounded the screen that fired laser-like beams to the receivers on the other side of the screen, mounted in a series of little holes in the screen bezel, about 20 holes on the top and bottom and 15 on each side. Your finger would block these beams, telling the computer what you were pointing at on the screen. It was intuitive and worked well until those little holes on the bottom got clogged with dust and dirt; then you’d have to take a vacuum to clean them out before the touchscreen worked reliably again. Still, in an era before the computer mouse was common, it was a serious advance.
I vaguely recall seeing something like that…it was probably the late 1980s, at the Boston Museum of Science.
Count me in as a fan of the LeBaron GTS — certainly not the most extraordinary car in the world, but a very good one in my opinion, and an absolutely great college car.
It seems like these were common in the ’80s and early ’90s, so it’s a bit of a surprise in hindsight to remember that they were only made for 5 years and didn’t sell in very high quantities. Definitely seemed like the Odd Man Out as far as Chrysler’s 1980s lineup, with a Euro-inspired design and a noticeable lack of chrome.
Regarding the hood mishap, that’s something that I’ve heard about happening, but I’ve never known anyone it’s happened to. Amazing to see the aftermath.
I’m looking forward to more from your COAL series!
Really enjoyed this one because of the computer connection. Nice to see other folks with similar experiences.
At a very young age I was the recipient of a Commodore VIC-20 with a cassette drive for storage and a whopping 5k (!) of RAM. Later on, my father surprised me with a drive to a computer dealer out in the suburbs (back then, computers were sold more like cars than commodities). He had ordered an Apple IIGS for me with all the options. It was $3,000 in 1986 cash. He knew that I had a knack for computers and electronics and wanted to make sure I followed up on it. It still amazes me he dropped that kind of money on it. I loved that machine. I still have an affinity for the 6502 from my first two computers.
Come time for college, I really wanted a car. But my personal income would have gotten me a $500 death trap, so I wasn’t really in the market. I was kind of hoping my dad would help me out. But he was a smart man, so my graduation gift wasn’t a car, but a shiny new Pentium 120MHz PC- top of the line at that time. So I biked and bussed everywhere but learned a hell of a lot about computers.
If you asked me what I wanted to do for a living when I was 9 I would have said “I want to write software for my Apple.” And now 30 years later, I write software for iPhones.
Glad my dad got me those computers instead of a car. And I still bike and bus everywhere.
(Still love cars, though. Obviously or I wouldn’t be checking in here every day.)
Looks like you won the Chrysler Quality Lottery, aside from that hood latch! I’ve always wondered what one of these with the manual and the turbo 2.2 would be like to drive-I imagine a hell of a lot more fun than was my 1986 with the colossally-terrible 2.5 non-turbo and a column-shifted automatic. The transmission made it so much longer than did the engine-a whopping 110,000 miles before it lost second gear completely!-without need of major repair. The engine needed its first engine-out repair under my parents’ stewardship at around 50,000, the second around 72,000, and the third (which was the price for an otherwise free car and entry into the realm of motoring with an automobile of my own) at 102,000. Even then we still never managed to quite sort the lifter tick.
All that said, sometime between the 102,000 mile camshaft/lifter/related bits rebuild and the 110,000 mile transmission replacement, I discovered that mine would do about 102 miles per hour (my guess as the 125-mph analog speedometer wavered between 98 and 107) flat-out on one of the Midwest’s straight-as-a-line flat-as-a-tabletop roads. In retrospect, it’s a wonder I didn’t smoke the engine, given its dicey history. I have no idea how well the car handled because, well, every road where I grew up was straight as a line and flat as a tabletop.
But damn was that car a looker-one of the best of the 1980s I think. The LeBaron GTS version was definitely the more attractive of the two-the Dodge cross and taillight detailing didn’t work nearly as well on the Lancer. I haven’t seen one on the road in years now-they were hard to find even in the boneyards even in the late 1990s in my part of Michigan.
I can verify that a 2.2 turbo and 5 speed was fun…especially in a 2200lb Shelby Charger.
It was even more fun with an intercooler, Direct Connection computer, and free flow exhaust.
These were petty neat cars for the time but I would hardly call the 2.2/2.2 turbo and 2.5 engine family anvil tough for reliability. I distinctly remember oil leaks, piston pin knock, head gaskets, turbo failures and some early build 2.2’s with failed camshafts. The 81-85 carbureted 2.2’s were a drive-ability nightmare when the miles started getting into the 60-80K range and emission related sensor failures were very common.
With that said I would rate the 2.2/2.5 family of Chrysler motors better than the Mitsubishi 2.6 and it wasn’t all that common to see them actually blow a rod or seize up per se. It was more the Chrysler hit and miss quality control, not so good engine seals and older clunkier computer controls that sometimes dogged these. We had loads of experience with 80’s and early 90’s Chrysler products in our dealership infancy days. As with many 80’s cars they were hit and miss but the turbo 2.2 did stand out for being relatively quick but also quite noisy and gruff making these engines really out of character in the stretched K-car New Yorkers. This was noted often in Consumer Guide auto series write ups of these cars back in the day.
Always found these to be good-looking cars. Glad to hear your experience was a good one, other than that hood latch mishap!
My aunt Nancy had one of these when I was a kid. I loved it.
If I was wealthy and collected cars, this is one of the cars that would be in my stable, along with other Mopars (and for sure the LH, with a plum, loaded 1993 Concorde being my most prized collection).
Of course I don’t need to be wealthy to own a 1985 LeBaron GTS, but I would need to if I wanted to own most models of Mopars produced from the late 60s to present. That’s a lot of garage space!
Yep, I would rather have a LeBaron GTS in pristine condition rather than something like a Ferrari.
The LeBaron GTS and Lancer were probably the most convincingly import-like American cars from a styling perspective, IMO. It was clearly modern, but conservative and folded enough to look Japanese (where Ford’s Aero-cars had a look that was very much specific to the brand on both sides of the ocean). Very attractive cars for their time.