Prime Computer

Prime Computer was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992.

Robert Baron (President)
Sidney Halligan (VP Sales)
James Campbell (Director of Marketing)
Joseph Cashen (VP Hardware Engineering)
Robert Burkeweitz (VP Manufacturing)
William Poduska (VP Software Engineering)
John Carter (Director of Human Resources)

The company started with the motto "Software First".

Poduska left in 1980 to start Apollo Computer.

The company' operating system, PRIMOS, is a derivative of Multics. This OS was originally implemented mostly in the Fortran programming language. Subsequently the PL/P and Modula-2 languages were used in the Kernel. A number of new PRIMOS utilities were written in SP/L which was similar to PL/P.

The original products were clones of the Honeywell 316 and 516 minicomputers. The Prime 400 was a successful minicomputer of its day (late 1970's) and the Prime 750 (1979) was a competitor to the DEC Vax 11/780 and was one of the first 32bit superminicomputers.

The company was successful in the 1970s and 1980s, peaking in 1988 at number 334 of the Fortune 500.

By the late eighties, the company was having problems retaining customers who were moving to lower-cost systems. In addition, Prime was failing to keep up with the increasing need among the user base for raw computing power. By the end, not a single Prime computer was subject to COCOM export controls, as they were insufficiently powerful for the US Government to fear their falling into the hands of hostile powers.

The company explored transitioning into a computer-aided design company by purchasing several CAD companies including Computervision in 1989 for $300 million. The purchase left the company vulnerable to a hostile take-over. Such a take-over attempt was made by Bennett S. LeBow through his Basic4 corporation. To fend off the take-over, the company was bought back into private ownership by New York venture capitalist, JH Whitney. In the end, the computer design and manufacturing portions of the company was shut down and the company was renamed Computervision.

Specialised Software

General Business

Office Automation System

Prime acquired the OAS application from Lincoln National, a large insurance corporation, in the late 1970s or early 1980s. It is unclear whether Prime co-developed the system with the insurer.

It was one of the pioneer systems, and fought hard to win a place in the UK DTI Office Automation Pilot sites, but failed to achieve it.

OAS consisted of:

electronic mail, initially restricted to a single, non networked minicomputer, only much later released into a synchronised global directory system, albeit only functioning with Prime to Prime networks
word processing, either on dumb terminals like the PT25, PT45 and PST100, or on the partially intelligent PT65 terminal which had to download its WP software from the host minicomputer whenever it was turned on, and was a "page based" word processing system. Such an intelligent workstation concept is very Wang-like, but the execution was far slower than Wang's dual co-ax 928 link since it was over standard RS232C cabling runs. The word processing was not of the highest quality, and the PT65 was subject to software errors that scrambled the documents being worked on

Recognising the drawbacks of the downloadable WP workstation, Prime formed an agreement with Convergent Technologies for their AWS which Prime named the "Prime Producer 100" (launched in mid 1983) and later for Convergent's modular NGEN, clip together system, the "Prime Producer 200" (launched in 1984), each of which had far superior WP to the initial Prime offering, and were document based.

In the UK Prime had a very active OAS User Group whose suggestions were acted upon in new product development. UK Pioneers of the system included the London Docklands Development Corporation and Oxford Polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes University.

Prime Information

Very similar in concept and execution to the Pick environment developed by Richard Pick, Prime Information allowed rapid, 4GL or 4GL-like development of applications around relational or quasi relational database structures.

Prime Information Connection

In (approx) 1984 Prime developed a system to conflict with OAS and confuse the market. Prime Information Connection added word processing to Prime Information, giving the company two office oriented suites to offer in a marketplace dominated by Wang Laboratories

CAD/CAM

External links

Defunct computer companies of the United States | Minicomputers | Computer-aided design | Software companies