The Rise and Fall of Prime Computer
Prime is a good example of the innovation and excitement that was around in the early days of the computing industry and the fact that it was possible at that time for a small number of dedicated people to create a computer system that could compete.Essentially the company was started by a group of individuals, some of whom had worked together on the Multics Operating System project at MIT.
(An interesting aside, another operating systems evolved out of the Multics project, essentially being cut down version of the Multics Operating System. It was named, jokingly at first, UNICS, that being ‘Multics without the balls’. That name stuck and lives on as Unix, while few people have heard of Multics.)
The first Prime computer the Prime 200 was produced in 1972, subsequently in 1973 and 1974 the Prime 300 and Prime 400 were released. As was common in that era, there was a significant performance improvement and much technical innovation from one model to the next. This was particularly important to areas such as CAD that constantly demanded larger machines to do ever more sophisticated tasks in this regard Prime proved itself to be very effective.
The early Prime machines were based on the Honeywell 316 and 516 systems and ran a proprietary operating system called DOS or PRIMOS. The machines were aimed at the technical market and were widely used in universities and organizations such as Ford in their Computer Aided Design area.
As Prime developed ever more capable and powerful machines it also enhanced the operating system to match, something like 20 versions each with Sub-Version of PrimOS were released. One attractive thing about the Prime range of systems was that the operating system could run unaltered across the entire range. Prime was also an early adopter of networking and this made it an attractive option to Ford. Over time Ford used Prime extensively throughout the world and into its suppliers and engineering contractors.
Prime was very successful in the 70s and early 80s and made its way into the fortune 500 group of companies. By the late 80s and early 90s Prime had began to run out of steam with users demanding ever more processing power per dollar and Prime not able to keep the development up with the demand. Increasingly lower cost systems were able to deliver the performance looked for with the attendant loss of customers.
While Prime had developed solutions in other fields, many of Prime’s successful offerings were CAD based. In order to regain some of its dominance Prime purchased a number of CAD companies. Unfortunately the cost of this left the company vulnerable to a hostile takeover, and an attempt was made to do just that. Prime was put back into private ownership by a venture capitalist J.H. Whitney who ultimately split the company shut down the manufacturing and design parts keeping the CAD solutions. The remainder of the company specifically the CAD part was later sold to Parametric Technologies who are still around today.
During its heyday prime had a significant presence in the marketplace and competed head to head with the likes of DEC. One of its most successful marketing campaigns was run in 1980 using actors Tom Baker and Lalla Ward as their Dr Who characters (see this post)
Like many companies of the era, Prime had its own unique approach which included its own Operating System, hardware and range of terminals including the Prime PT200 and PT250. Many of its users continued to use the Prime machines well after the company ceased to exist switching to Terminal Emulation as the terminals died. Ultimately the cost of maintaining these systems and the ready availability of very powerful systems for a fraction of the cost of the original machine dealt the death blow to even these systems.