Video: Prime, Step into the 80′s!
The story of Prime computers is an interesting one, the greatly abridged version of which is that they were a large manufacturer of minicomputers in the 1970′s and 80′s who, after a lengthy decline, bowed out of the industry in the quite unexpectedly. They left behind many customers who’d bought into their line of equipment with huge investments in Prime technology and sadly added weight to the old industry adage, ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’.
Like many manufacturers of that era they also produced several models of proprietary terminals, such as the PT250, which is still supported by the occasional terminal emulator today…but that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is a series of great TV spots from the early 80′s staring the Tom Baker version of Doctor Who!
Prime also ran a series of ads staring their own c-3P0 clone (Albert EinPrime!). These obviously ran in Australia (note the voice over) but probably screened elsewhere too. Not as good as the Tom Baker ads, but then, how can you compete with the Doctor?
TTWin and Teemtalk are two commercial terminal emulators which are capable of emulating a prime terminal.