Prime Computer, Inc.

~ the obit ~

Seven people started Prime Computer in Natick, Massachusetts in 1972, and several of them came off the Multics project at MIT, which is the detail that explains the machines. Multics was the operating system that tried to do everything at once and did not sell, but the people who built it walked away with ideas about memory segmentation and protection rings that minicomputers would not otherwise see for another decade. Prime put those ideas in a box a university department could actually buy.

The 50 series ran PRIMOS, written mostly in Fortran IV with assembler underneath. That sounds like an accident and was closer to a decision, since the customers were engineers who already read Fortran and could be handed source. A Prime sat in a machine room with a few dozen terminals hanging off it and served a whole floor. That was the minicomputer pitch in one sentence: a computer owned by a department rather than by a corporation or a person, and for fifteen years it was a very good business to be in.

By 1985 Prime was the sixth largest company in the minicomputer sector with something like $564 million in revenue. In 1988 it landed at number 334 on the Fortune 500. That was the high point, and it was also the year the trouble arrived.

I was eight years old when the last Prime shipped. The category was finished before I ever sat in front of a machine with a modem in it, and by the time I was studying computer engineering the word minicomputer survived only in the first two weeks of an architecture course, positioned against the mainframe above it and the workstation below. What I have actually used is the part of Prime that did not die. Its CAD business ended up inside PTC, and engineers open the descendants of that software every working day with no idea whose corpse it came out of.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

Prime's customers were not the people IBM sold to. They were engineering departments and government labs, the places where a hundred people needed a shared machine and nobody was going to sign off on a mainframe. The 50 series held that ground through the whole late seventies and most of the eighties, and Prime built out the network software and the terminal fleet around it so the room full of green screens felt like one system rather than a switchboard.

In 1988 it bought Computervision, a CAD company whose software ran the drafting departments of manufacturers. That purchase is the reason anything survived. Prime paid for it with debt at the exact moment the market for its own hardware was starting to go, which is a sequence that looks reckless now and looked like diversification then.

~ the postmortem ~

The financier Bennett LeBow came at Prime in 1988 using MAI Basic Four as the vehicle. Management did not want to be taken, so it found a friendlier buyer and went private in a $1.3 billion leveraged buyout led by J.H. Whitney. The defense worked in the sense that LeBow did not get the company. It failed in every other sense, because the debt from the buyout landed on a business whose product line was being eaten from below by PCs and from the side by Unix workstations.

On 22 july 1992 the 50 series hardware operations were shut down and the staff went. What was left renamed itself Computervision, which is the corporate equivalent of a family taking the surname of the in-laws. Parametric Technology Corporation bought that in 1998 and the name Prime went off the paperwork for good.

~ the funny part ~

There is a company called Prime Computer today. It is Swiss, founded in 2013, based in St. Gallen, and it makes fanless mini PCs. It has no lineage to Natick whatsoever, and it holds the name cleanly because a name is only worth something while somebody is using it. Twenty years of Fortune 500 revenue bought no claim on those two words at all.

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