Prime Computer, Inc. was a
Natick, MassachusettsNatick is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. Natick is located near the center of the MetroWest region of Massachusetts, with a population of 33,006 at the 2010 census. Only west from Boston, Natick is considered part of the Greater Boston area...
-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. The alternative spellings "PR1ME" and "PR1ME Computer" were used as brand names or
logoA logo is a graphic mark or emblem commonly used by commercial enterprises, organizations and even individuals to aid and promote instant public recognition...
s by the company.
Founders
The company was started by 7 founders, some of whom worked on the
MulticsMultics was an influential early time-sharing operating system. The project was started in 1964 in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
project at MIT.
- Robert Baron (President)
- Sidney Halligan (VP Sales)
- James Campbell (Director of Marketing)
- Joseph Cashen (VP Hardware Engineering)
- Robert Berkowitz (VP Manufacturing)
- William Poduska
Dr. John William Poduska, Sr was a founder of Prime Computer, Apollo Computer, and Stellar Computer. Prior to that he headed the Electronics Research Lab at NASA's Cambridge, Massachusetts facility and also worked at Honeywell....
(VP Software Engineering)
- John Carter (Director of Human Resources)
The company started with the motto
"Software First".
Poduska left in 1981 to start
Apollo ComputerApollo Computer, Inc., founded 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts by William Poduska and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo was one of the first vendors of graphical workstations in the 1980s...
.
History
The original products were clones of the
Honeywell 316The Honeywell 316 was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by Honeywell starting in 1969. It is part of the Series 16 which includes the Models 116, 316, 416, 516 and 716. They were commonly used for data acquisition and control, remote message concentration, clinical laboratory systems and...
and 516 minicomputers.
The first Prime system, similar to the DDP 516 but a 32-bit machine with paging. It ran an operating system called DOS, also referred to as PRIMOS 2 (not to be confused with MS DOS).
The Prime 100 was a stripped down version of the Prime 200 (no memory parity or floating point).
The Prime 300 had a main store of 32KB to 512 KB and from 6MB of Pertec disc storage.
It ran DOSVM operating system, also referred to as PRIMOS 3, but still used earlier DOS for booting.
One of the first minicomputers with microcode-supported virtual memory capability. The virtual memory was simpler than used in later systems. Addresses were 16 bits, with each of up to 32 time-sharing (time slice) users, receiving a virtual 64K address space. It had S-mode and R-mode instructions.
An example of the Prime 300 was installed in the mathematics department of the
University of Aston in BirminghamAston University is a "plate glass" campus university situated at Gosta Green, in the city centre of Birmingham, England.Established in 1895 as the Birmingham Municipal Technical School, Aston was granted its Royal Charter as Aston University on 22 April 1966...
, UK and at the Medical University of Hannover, Germany.
The Prime 400 ran at 0.5 MIPS, had a main store of up to 8mb and 160MB of disc storage. The name PRIMOS was now used for the operating system and the P400 ran PRIMOS 4. It ran a V-mode instruction set, along with the S-mode and R-mode instructions. It had a
segmentedSegmentation may mean:*Market segmentation, in economics and marketingBiology*A process of morphogenesis that divides a metazoan body into a series of semi-repetitive segments*Segmentation , a series of semi-repetitive segments...
virtual memory architecture, somewhat similar to
MulticsMultics was an influential early time-sharing operating system. The project was started in 1964 in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
.
- 1979: Prime 450, 550, 650 ,750
The Prime 550 was an upgrade in performance over the Prime 400. It ran at 0.7 MIPS, had up 2MB of memory and 500MB of disc storage and a 9 track tape unit.
The Prime 750 was a major upgrade. It ran at 1.0 MIPS, had 2-8MB of memory and 1200MB of disc storage and a 9 track tape unit. This was very competitive with a similarly priced
DECDigital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
VAX-11/780The VAX-11 was a family of minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture . The VAX-11/780 was the first VAX computer.- VAX-11/780 :...
and was one of the first
32-bitThe range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295. Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB of byte-addressable memory....
superminicomputers. Prime 750 systems were installed at
Rutherford Appleton LaboratoryThe Rutherford Appleton Laboratory is one of the national scientific research laboratories in the UK operated by the Science and Technology Facilities Council . It is located on the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus at Chilton near Didcot in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom...
(RAL),
University of PaisleyThe University of the West of Scotland is a university operating from four campuses in south-western Scotland, in the towns of Paisley, Hamilton, Ayr and Dumfries. The present institution dates from August 2007, following the merger of the University of Paisley with Bell College, Hamilton...
, Leeds University, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) and the
CADCentreAVEVA Group plc is a British multinational company headquartered in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It provides engineering design, information management solutions, and CAD/CAM software along with technology consulting services for the Plant , Power and Marine industries.It is listed on the...
in Cambridge.
PRIMENET and the local area network software RINGNET were announced.
- 1980: Prime 150 and 250
- 1981: Prime 850 (dual CPU machine)
Prime also marketed MEDUSA CAD Software
- 1982: Prime 2250 aka internally as "Rabbit"
- 1984: Prime 2550, 9650, 9750
- 1985: Prime 9955, 9655, 2655
The 9955 ran at 4.0 MIPS, had 8-16MB of memory and 2700MB of disc storage and a 9 track tape unit.
Five Prime 9955 were installed at the University of Salford (along with other systems such as the 2250, 2550, and 750); a Prime 9955 was installed at UMIST and a Prime 9655 at Nottingham University.
- 1986: Prime 2350, 2450, 9755, and 9955-II
- 1987: Prime 2455, 2755, 6350, and 6550
By 1987 Prime Computer had introduced an alternative line of Intel 80386-based computers, the EXL-316 series, running the
UnixUnix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
operating system.
The company was successful in the 1970s and 1980s, peaking in 1988 at number 334 of the
Fortune 500The Fortune 500 is an annual list compiled and published by Fortune magazine that ranks the top 500 U.S. closely held and public corporations as ranked by their gross revenue after adjustments made by Fortune to exclude the impact of excise taxes companies collect. The list includes publicly and...
. In 1985 the company was the 6th largest in the minicomputer sector, with estimated revenues of US $564 million Much of this was based on the US Banking industry where the Pr1me Info database was widely accepted.
As of later 1989, Surrey University had the largest Prime Site in Europe, having multiple copies of virtually every 50 series machine (mostly running Primos 20.x, but some still running 19.x).
Prime was heavily involved with Ford’s internal
computer-aided designComputer-aided design , also known as computer-aided design and drafting , is the use of computer technology for the process of design and design-documentation. Computer Aided Drafting describes the process of drafting with a computer...
(CAD) product, Product Design Graphics System (PDGS). It used a
vectorscopeA vectorscope is a special type of oscilloscope used in both audio and video applications. Whereas an oscilloscope or waveform monitor normally displays a plot of signal vs. time, a vectorscope displays an X-Y plot of two signals, which can reveal details about the relationship between these two...
from
LundyLundy is the largest island in the Bristol Channel, lying off the coast of Devon, England, approximately one third of the distance across the channel between England and Wales. It measures about at its widest. Lundy gives its name to a British sea area and is one of the islands of England.As of...
for a display. At one time in 1980s it was the world largest integrated CAD system, spanning the US, Japan (Mazda was Ford's subsidiary/partner), and Germany. The creators of PDGS, located in building #3 of Fords Dearborn design headquarters, began working on the concept of parametrically driven geometry, which led to a PRIMEDesign system.
The company also had marketing rights to the MEDUSA CAD system, produced in England by a company named Cambridge Interactive Systems, and experience in the domain, the company explored transitioning to a CAD company. It embarked on a project to build a CAD-CAM system of its own called PRIMEDesign headed by Vladimir Geisberg. This product was to compete with the industry leader at that time, CADDS4 from
ComputervisionComputervision, Inc. was an early pioneer in turnkey Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing . Computervision was founded in 1969 by Marty Allen and Philippe Villers, and headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, USA. Its early products were built on a Data General Nova platform...
. RISC processors from
MIPS TechnologiesMIPS Technologies, Inc. , formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc., is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of pioneering RISC chips. MIPS provides processor architectures and cores for digital home, networking and mobile applications.MIPS Computer Systems Inc. was...
and graphics processors from
Silicon GraphicsSilicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
created the platform for PRIMEDesign as well as being the genesis of modern day
SGISilicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
. During this period, in 1985, Sam Geisberg left Computervision to found
Parametric Technology CorporationParametric Technology Corporation is a U.S.-based company that develops, markets and supports software for product development. Its main products are for CAD/CAM, engineering calculations, and product lifecycle management. Its customers include companies in manufacturing, publishing, services,...
and produce a supposedly parameter driven CAD system called ProEngineer. Computervision acquired Cambridge Interactive Systems in 1983, and Prime forked their own version of MEDUSA.
Prime subsequently purchased Computervision and Vladimir Geisberg, then VP for CAD, tried to merge back together the Prime and Computervision versions of the Medusa CAD system, and to launch the Prime Design system. As time passed it became clear that the Prime Design system, while leading edge in theory, was totally unsuitable for real engineering design work. Prime Design was canned and Vladimir Geisberg was sacked in 1990 having failed to launch a viable CAD product and having destroyed the development organisation for the ongoing Medusa CAD product.
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 customers' need for raw computing power. By the end, not a single Prime computer was subject to
COCOMCoCom is an acronym for Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls. CoCom was established by Western bloc powers in the first five years after the end of World War II, during the Cold War, to put an arms embargo on COMECON countries.CoCom ceased to function on March 31, 1994, and the...
export controls, as they were insufficiently powerful for the US Government to fear their falling into the hands of hostile powers.
The computer design and manufacturing portions of the company were shut down and the company was renamed Computervision. In 1998 it was bought by aforementioned Parametric Technology Corporation, that exists to this day. The remainder of the company became a support organisation for existing customers.
Operating system
The company operating system,
PRIMOSPRIMOS was an operating system developed during the 1970s by Prime Computer for its minicomputer systems. It rapidly gained popularity and by the mid-1980s was a serious contender as a mainline minicomputer operating system...
was originally written mostly in the
FortranFortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
IV programming language with some assembler. Subsequently the
PL/PThe PL/P programming language is a medium-level language developed by Prime Computer to serve as their second primary operating system programming language after Fortran IV....
and
Modula-2Modula-2 is a computer programming language designed and developed between 1977 and 1980 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich as a revision of Pascal to serve as the sole programming language for the operating system and application software for the personal workstation Lilith...
languages were used in the Kernel. A number of new PRIMOS utilities were written in SP/L which was similar to PL/P.
Prime 300 specification
- A microprogrammed 16-bit central processor with floating point hardware, error detection and system integrity checking features.
- 128K byte, 600 nanosecond access MOS main memory.
- 6MB cartridge disk. 165 cps character printer.
- System software including a disk operating system and FORTRAN, BASIC and Assembly languages.
- support for up to 31 users for a total purchase price of about US$165,000
Office Automation System
Prime acquired the OAS application from its developer, ACS America Inc., a now-defunct New York City software house.
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
Wang Laboratories was a computer company founded in 1951 by Dr. An Wang and Dr. G. Y. Chu. The company was successively headquartered in Cambridge , Tewksbury , and finally in Lowell, Massachusetts . At its peak in the 1980s, Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of $3 billion and employed over...
-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.
Prime also claimed that OAS provided automatic translation between languages, but the feature was mostly non-existent, consisting only of one-word-at-a-time lookup in small dictionaries for Spanish and Norwegian.
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 CorporationThe London Docklands Development Corporation was a quango agency set up by the UK Government in 1981 to regenerate the depressed Docklands area of east London. During its eighteen-year existence it was responsible for regenerating an area of in the London Boroughs of Newham, Tower Hamlets and...
and
Oxford PolytechnicOxford Brookes University is a new university in Oxford, England. It was named to honour the school's founding principal, John Brookes. It has been ranked as the best new university by the Sunday Times University Guide 10 years in a row...
, now Oxford Brookes University.
Prime Information
Very similar in concept and execution to the
PickThe Pick operating system is a demand-paged, multiuser, virtual memory, time-sharing operating system based around a unique "multivalued" database. Pick is used primarily for business data processing...
environment developed by Richard Pick, Prime Information allowed rapid, 4GL or 4GL-like development of applications around relational or quasi relational database structures. After a series of evolutions and acquisitions this product is now part of the Rocket U2 software suite.
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 LaboratoriesWang Laboratories was a computer company founded in 1951 by Dr. An Wang and Dr. G. Y. Chu. The company was successively headquartered in Cambridge , Tewksbury , and finally in Lowell, Massachusetts . At its peak in the 1980s, Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of $3 billion and employed over...
CAD/CAM
Prime originally entered the CAD industry through Ford. At the time Ford was using Control Data Corporation (CDC) stand-alone computers. Data was shared via reel tape and stored in “Data Collector” rooms at each facility. Ford began looking for a small computer that had all the advantages of the CDC computers, but could also connect to a network.
Prime’s 2250 (“Rabbit”) offered the combination Ford was looking for in a package smaller than the original CDCs. In addition, the PRIMOS operating system would run unaltered across all Prime platforms; from the 2250 up to the (what would be considered today as a server) 750. As a result, the Data Collector (rooms) would contain several 750 class machines, each with rows of CDC 300 or 600MB drives. Primenet (token ring) network connected all CAD stations in a building with its Data Collector.
Ford pushed PDGS out to its suppliers and engineering contractors throughout the northern Midwest.
Prime gained expertise over the years with its collaboration with Ford and continued to expand into the CAD market with its Medusa product. With the acquisition of ComputerVision, Prime appeared to be a formidable force in the CAD/CAM industry.
Prime Medusa versions 5 and CV Medusa 7 were merged/recombined into a product that was called Medusa version 12.
Prime also picked up Calma CAD systems from GE.
Encoding header field for Internet messages
Developed on
relay.prime.com, which was the hub that relayed global electronic mail for Prime Computer. The software used on this computer system, PDN Mail, developed by Robert Ullmann, was designed to use the encoding header field that was later explained in a
Request for CommentsIn computer network engineering, a Request for Comments is a memorandum published by the Internet Engineering Task Force describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems.Through the Internet Society, engineers and...
. PDN Mail was years ahead of its time and was also used by Microsoft Corporation until
MIMEMultipurpose Internet Mail Extensions is an Internet standard that extends the format of email to support:* Text in character sets other than ASCII* Non-text attachments* Message bodies with multiple parts...
was introduced.
Before MIME existed, PDN Mail was able to perform the same functions and was used to send software updates as well as all sorts of attachments between systems. In August 1993, Robert Ullmann, David Robinson and Al Costanzo, wrote RFC 1505. This RFC, documented the Encoding Header Field for Internet Messages that PDN mail used and was published by the RFC editor,
Jon PostelJonathan Bruce Postel was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards...
that same year.
Marketing
A series of memorable advertisements from 1980 featured actors
Tom BakerThomas Stewart "Tom" Baker is a British actor. He is best known for playing the fourth incarnation of the Doctor in the science fiction television series Doctor Who, a role he played from 1974 to 1981.-Early life:...
and
Lalla WardSarah Ward known as Lalla Ward, is an English actor, author and illustrator. As an actor, she is known for playing the part of Romana in the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who. She is married to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.-Early career:Ward's stage name, "Lalla", comes...
as their characters from the TV series
Doctor WhoDoctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien known as the Doctor who explores the universe in a sentient time machine called the TARDIS that flies through time and space, whose exterior...
. All four of these adverts have since been included on the DVD release of the 1979 serial
Destiny of the DaleksDestiny of the Daleks is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts from 1 September to 22 September 1979. The story introduces Lalla Ward as the newly-regenerated Romana....
in which both actors appear.
Another series of advertisements featured a
C-3POC-3PO is a robot character from the Star Wars universe who appears in both the original Star Wars films and the prequel trilogy. He is also a major character in the television show Droids, and appears frequently in the series' "Expanded Universe" of novels, comic books, and video games...
-like robot called Albert EinPrime.
External links