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Prime Computer was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. Natick Common, Halloween 2004 Natick is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. ...
HP2114 minicomputer Minicomputer is a largely obsolete term for a class of multi-user computers which make up the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems (mainframe computers) and the smallest single-user systems (microcomputers or personal computers). ...
1972 (MCMLXXII) was a leap year starting on Saturday. ...
1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday. ...
Founders
The company was started by 7 founders, some of whom worked on the Multics project at MIT. Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) was an extraordinarily influential early time-sharing operating system. ...
Mapúa Institute of Technology (MIT, MapúaTech or simply Mapúa) is a private, non-sectarian, Filipino tertiary institute located in Intramuros, Manila. ...
- 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". Image File history File links Primecpu. ...
Image File history File links Primecpu. ...
CPU can stand for: in computing: Central processing unit in journalism: Commonwealth Press Union in law enforcement: Crime prevention unit in software: Critical patch update, a type of software patch distributed by Oracle Corporation in Macleans College is often known as Ash Lim. ...
Minicomputer (colloquially, mini) is a largely obsolete term for a class of multi-user computers which make up the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems (traditionally, mainframe computers) and the smallest single-user systems (microcomputers or personal computers). ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
Poduska left in 1980 to start Apollo Computer. 1980 (MCMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Tuesday. ...
Apollo Computer, Inc. ...
History The original products were clones of the Honeywell 316 and 516 minicomputers. Honeywell Heating Specialties Company Stock Certificate dated 1924 signed by Mark C. Honeywell - courtesy of Scripophily. ...
The first Prime system, similar to the DDP 516 but a 32-bit machine with paging. It ran DOS (also refered to as PRIMOS 2). The Prime 100 was a stripped down version of the Prime 200 (no memory parity or floating point). The first virtual-memory minicomputer. The Prime 300 had a main store of 128 KB and 6MB of disc storage. It ran DOSVM (also refered to as PRIMOS 3). DOS was used to boot DOSVM. The virtual memory was simpler than that used in later systems. Addresses were 16 bits, with a 64K address space. The VM allowed multiple 64K address spaces. It had S-mode and R-mode instructions.
An example was installed in the mathematics department of the University of Aston in Birmingham, UK.
The Prime 400 ran at 0.5 MIPS, had a main store of 192KB 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 segmented virtual memory architecture. - 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 1MB 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 2-4MB of memory and 1200MB of disc storage and a 9 track tape unit. This was very competitive with a similarly priced DEC VAX-11/780 and was one of the first 32-bit superminicomputers. Prime 750 systems were installed at RAL (RUTHERFORD APPLETON LABORATORY) and UMIST. The DEC logo Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. ...
VAX is a 32-bit computing architecture that supports an orthogonal instruction set (machine language) and virtual addressing (i. ...
32-bit is a term applied to processors, and computer architectures which manipulate the address and data in 32-bit chunks. ...
A supermini can be: A car size class used in Europe. ...
PRIMENET and the local area network software RINGNET were announced.
- 1980: Prime 150 and 250
- 1981: Prime 850
Prime also marketed MEDUSA CAD Software - 1982: Prime 2250
- 1984: Prime 2550, 9650, 9750
- 1985: Prime 9955, 9655, 2655
The 9955 ran at 4.0 MIPS, had 8-12MB of memory and 2700MB of disc storage and a 9 track tape unit. 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
The company was successful in the 1970s and 1980s, peaking in 1988 at number 334 of the Fortune 500. The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, inclusive. ...
The 1980s refers to the years of and between 1980 and 1989. ...
1988 (MCMLXXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
The Fortune 500 is a ranking of the top 500 United States corporations as measured by gross revenue. ...
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. CoCom is an acronym for Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls. ...
Because the company 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 computer-aided design company. It embarked on a project to build a CAD-CAM system of its own called PRIMEDesign. This product was to compete with the industry leader at that time, CADDS4 from Computervision. This product effort used RISC processors from MIPS Technologies and graphics processors from Silicon Graphics that created the platform for PRIMEDesign as well as being the genesis of modern day SGI. During this period, Sam Geisberg left Computervision to found Parametric Technology Corporation and produce the first parameter driven CAD system called ProEngineer. “CAD†redirects here. ...
Computervision, Inc. ...
MIPS Technologies, formerly MIPS Computer Systems, is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of pioneering RISC CPUs. ...
Silicon Graphics, Inc. ...
Parametric Technology Corporation (NASDAQ: PMTC) provides product lifecycle management (PLM) engineering CAD/CAM software. ...
Pro/ENGINEER (commonly Pro/e or Pro) is a parametric feature based 3D Solid modeling CAD program created by PTC. Pro/e is a state of the art mechanical design tool. ...
Ultimately, Prime tried to improve its CAD presence by purchasing several CAD companies including Computervision in 1989 for $300 million. PRIMEDesign and CADDS were combined to form a new product called CADDS5. 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. Computervision, Inc. ...
1989 (MCMLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Bennett LeBow is the Chairman of the Board and CEO of Vector Group, the holding company for, among other companies, Liggett Group Inc. ...
Operating System The company' operating system, PRIMOS was originally written mostly in the Fortran IV programming language with some assembler. 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. PRIMOS was an operating system developed for Prime computers. ...
Fortran (previously FORTRAN[1]) is a general-purpose[2], procedural,[3] imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. ...
The PL/P programming language (an acronym of Programming Language for Prime (computers)) is a medium-level language developed by Prime Computers to serve as their second primary operating-system programming language after Fortran IV. Additions to the PRIMOS operating system for Prime 50 Series computers was written mostly in...
Modula-2 is a computer programming language invented by Niklaus Wirth at ETH around 1978, as a successor to Modula, an intermediate language by him. ...
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
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[citation needed].
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.
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. Wang logo circa 1976. ...
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. Convergent Technologies was a company formed by a small group of people who left Intel Corporation in 1979. ...
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. The London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) was a quango set up in 1981 to regenerate the Docklands area of east London. ...
Oxford Brookes is a public university in Oxfordshire, England. ...
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. This article or section is not written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article. ...
This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
A fourth-generation programming language (or 4GL) is a programming language designed with a specific purpose in mind such as the development of commercial business software. ...
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 Wang logo circa 1976. ...
CAD/CAM
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