Misplaced Pages

#759240

37-486: Computervision was acquired by Prime Computer in 1988 for $ 434 million. Prime subsequently adopted the Computervision name. On December 12, 1998 Parametric Technology Corporation acquired Computervision. Computervision's first product, CADDS-1, was aimed at the printed circuit board layout and 2-D drafting markets. CADDS stood for Computervison Automated Design and Drafting System. The CADDS-1 system featured

74-546: A B-spline package and improved refresh performance led to adoption by many large customers, including Boeing , which purchased dozens of systems for the 757/767 aircraft program. Improved 3-D design was added in the early 1980s with the CADDS4 product on the CGP200. This version of CADDS moved display technology from storage tube base displays to raster graphics and introduced the dedicated graphics co-processor board known as

111-532: A CAD/CAM product specialized for shipbuilding. Prime Computer Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.226 via cp1108 cp1108, Varnish XID 220416686 Upstream caches: cp1108 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 07:46:39 GMT PRIMOS PRIMOS is a discontinued operating system developed during

148-510: A big market for Prime in their early years. The unusual choice of FORTRAN for the OS programming language had to do with the people who founded Prime. They had worked for Honeywell on a NASA project. FORTRAN was the language they had used both at NASA and, for many of them, at MIT . This connection with Honeywell extended to the point that the original Prime computers were compatible with Honeywell Series 16 minicomputers. Honeywell, at that time,

185-495: A combination digitizer and plotter mounted on a large drafting table. Integrated circuit layout was added with the CADDS-2 product, which had a dedicated operating system and a 16-bit graphic database. When this proved insufficient resolution for VLSI (very large scale integration), the company developed CADDS-2/VLSI in the late 1970s. CADDS-2/VLSI included a new operating system, a 32-bit database, and user expandability through

222-440: A customizable real-time OS called RTOS. One feature of PRIMOS was that it, like UNIX , was largely written in a high level language (with callable assembly language library functions available). At first, this language was FORTRAN IV, which was an odd choice from a pure computer science standpoint: no pointers , no native string type, etc. FORTRAN was, however, the language most known to engineers, and engineers were

259-418: A dedicated programming language called ICPL (integrated circuit programming language), which was a dialect of BASIC , based on an interpreter licensed from Fairchild Semiconductor . The original CADDS-2 ran on Data General Nova 1200 computers. CADDS-2/VLSI ran on Computervision's own hardware/software which was a modified Data General Nova with a modified version of DG's RDOS operating system. CADDS3

296-658: A division of John Laing, had for some time been sponsoring work at Imperial University on the use of CAD in construction in the early 1970s and this led to Laing choosing the ComputerVision platform. At this time, Laing became the first CAD user in the UK Civil Engineering and Construction industry and were instrumental in developing and promoting the use of Computers in Construction. Mervyn Richards, responsible for this initiative later became one of

333-460: A maximum of 80 characters could be sent per message. Very early versions of PRIMOS (revision 6) were originally called DOS (PRIMOS 2) and later DOSVM (PRIMOS 3), but starting with PRIMOS 4, on the P400 system, PRIMOS was the name that stuck. There were many major releases of PRIMOS. The last official revision (24.0.0.R52) was released July 3, 1997. By this time, a company called Peritus (which employed

370-496: A number of ex-Prime engineers) was maintaining PRIMOS. From Revision 19, major portions of PRIMOS were written in the languages SPL and Modula-2 , the usage of the Prime Macro Assembler _(PMA), FORTRAN IV and PL/P declined considerably around this time. Programs were guaranteed to run on all current Prime processors (subject to sufficient resources being available), as well as all subsequent Prime processors. In

407-651: A partnership with Prime Computer which maintained its option on the MEDUSA source code. At the time, MEDUSA was available on the then newly released 32-bit so-called super mini computers, whose most prominent distributors were Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) (with their VAX hardware) and Prime Computer. In 1984 there was a fork in MEDUSA as Prime took its option to keep developing MEDUSA. This in effect created two different versions of MEDUSA: CIS MEDUSA (owned by Computervision, which ran on Prime, Sun and VAX workstations) and Prime MEDUSA (which only ran on Prime computers at

SECTION 10

#1732779999760

444-626: A version of PL/I , called PL/P , became the high level language of choice within PRIMOS, and the PL/P and, later Modula-2 , languages were used in the Kernel. Furthermore, some new PRIMOS utilities were written in SP/L, which was similar to PL/P. The source code to PRIMOS was available to customers and, thanks to FORTRAN and PL/P, customers could reasonably modify PRIMOS as needed. For example, around 1990,

481-646: The University of Salford in the UK, modified the PRIMOS running on its five 9955 systems so that undergraduates could no longer use the MESSAGE command, that wrapped the PRIMOS SMSG$ () call, to send messages to other undergraduates, because online "chatting" using that command was becoming rife, tying up terminals from the limited pool available. Messaging using that command was akin to SMS text messaging today, except

518-419: 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. With the advent of PCs and the decline of the minicomputer industry, Prime was forced out of the market in the early 1990s, and by the end of 2010 the trademarks for both PRIME and PRIMOS no longer existed. Prime had also offered

555-588: The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). With CADDS4, tailored packages were available for CAD drafting, CAM ( computer-aided manufacturing ), 3-D modeling, piping and plant design, printed circuit board layout, instrument panel design, and many other applications. During this period, they also contributed to the development of the IGES standard for CAD/CAM data exchange, along with Applicon and other competitors. The major breakthrough in 3-D Design

592-526: The JOB command, including the ability to schedule them for a particular time. The PRIMOS operating system incorporated advanced fault tolerance features to ensure system reliability and data integrity. One notable feature was the MIRROR_ON command, which facilitated the creation of a pair of logically equivalent, identical partitions that were maintained in real-time. This command was instrumental in enhancing

629-493: The MIRROR_ON command implemented this functionality at the software level, offering a flexible and cost-effective solution for data redundancy. Primes's main offerings, each covering a specific need, were: Prime's PRIMENET software was designed to enable "transparent access to any system in the network without burdening the user with extra commands." With PRIMENET, a user on System A could access files on System B as if they were on System A, or even log into another system using

666-503: The commonly available Teletype Model 33 ASR, the bit was customarily set to 1, and this became Prime's standard. This is vital to realize when transferring data from PRIMOS to almost any other system. By the time of Prime Computer 's demise, a list of languages supported by Primos included: Also available, but relatively uncommon, were: Late versions of PRIMOS included a scripting language , CPL (Command Procedure Language). This interpreted language , bearing similarities to Pascal,

703-637: The featured graduation speaker. The first graduating class of 18 students had over 75 job offers, launching a 20-year history of unparalleled placement success. One of the numerous "firsts" that was spun off the Alfred State program was a joint project with the New York State Department of Transportation, Region 6, to design highways and bridges and associated structures in 3-D CADDs which resulted in New York State being one of

740-469: The first major customers in the UK for ComputerVision were the construction company John Laing PLC. "In 1975 John Laing purchased a ComputerVision CADDS3 computer aided design and drafting system to carry out investigations into the use of CAD in the construction engineering and building environment" - Mervyn Richards, Laing Technology Group (Thomas Telford Press, Institute of Civil Engineers, Conference - ISBN   0-7277-1340-X ) Laing Design Partners,

777-762: The first to use CADDS for highway design. In 1981 the United States Navy awarded an “ indefinite quantity, indefinite delivery contract valued at $ 63,000,000 for Designer V hardware, CADDS4 software, services, and training. Primarily used by the Navy Laboratories, in the 1985 time frame, CADDS was adopted by the Navy shipyards to support waterfront activities, and the Naval Sea Systems Command to support contract ship design. As of 2013, CADDS (by then CADDS5) continued in production as

SECTION 20

#1732779999760

814-531: The industries leading experts in Computer Aided Design, Modeling and construction IT (see the BS1192 specification). His work with CADDS3, ComputerVision and Elstree Computing Limited lead to the development and distribution of many software tools for ComputerVision platforms, promoting their use and popularising the platform for many years - right up to CADDS5. The Queen Alia Airport , by example,

851-505: The microelectronic CAD market) in 1989. Computervision was acquired by Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) in 1998, which (as of 2013) still produces the CADDS5 product, although only as a CAD/CAM product specialized for shipbuilding. In 2001, PTC sold the MEDUSA and MPDS Plant Design System software rights to CAD Schroer, which has developed a Fourth Generation of each system. One of

888-414: The system loader. Indexed data could be stored in a MIDAS file: Multi-Indexed Data Access System and be accessed via COBOL or FORTRAN. Among the third-party tools was a package named Queo , which was more powerful than COBOL despite being less verbose. The PRIMOS character set was basically ASCII but with the 8th bit inverted. The original 7-bit standard for ASCII left the 8th bit unspecified, but on

925-421: The system's resilience to hardware failures. When activated, the MIRROR_ON command initiated disk mirroring , duplicating all write operations to a primary disk onto a secondary disk. This redundancy allowed the system to seamlessly continue operations using the mirror partition in the event of a failure of the primary partition. Unlike RAID 1 , which typically requires specific hardware support for disk mirroring,

962-437: The time of acquisition, but which Prime subsequently ported to SunOS as Prime MEDUSA version 5.0). The two versions had a slightly different file format and the development language was developed in slightly different directions. The split in MEDUSA development was merged when Prime Computers acquired Computervision, with the promise to CV customers that VAX and Sun users would not be forced to switch to Prime workstations. Prime

999-543: The twenty-first century. As of 2019, CADDS (now at version CADDS5) was offered as a CAD/CAM system specialized for shipbuilding. In 1983 Computervision purchased Cambridge Interactive Systems (CIS), founded by British computer scientist Dr. Dick Newell and Tom Sancha. Computervision was interested in obtaining some of the state-of-the-art technology of the MEDUSA CAD system the Cambridge company had developed. CIS had

1036-501: The versions of PRIMOS ca. 1977 and later, the filesystem included a distinctive construct known as the Segment Directory. Unlike more traditional directories, the files anchored in a segment directory were located using an integer index, effectively reducing searches of the directory to a simple hash function . Segment Directories were used in their Keyed-Index/Direct Access (KI/DA) file access system and in later versions of

1073-568: Was a classic project to which these systems were used (by John Laing PLC). The first higher educational user of Computervision equipment was State University of New York College of Technology at Alfred, New York which acquired a CADDS3 system in 1979 with the help of a NSF grant and generous donation of equipment by Computervision employees Virgil Ross, Drew Davis and Bob Gothie. Alfred State graduated their first AAS Computer Graphics Engineering Technology (TAC/ABET) Graduates in 1983 with Martin Allen as

1110-520: Was both accessible to novice users and capable of powerful command line automation. ESRI used PRIMOS CPL as a basis for the platform-independent scripting languages AML (for ArcInfo ) and SML ( PC-ARC/INFO ). This was a step beyond what already was available via: "Phantoms" were a form of unattended background processes that immediately began to run in the background when initiated by the PHANTOM command. "Conventional" batch jobs were initiated via

1147-575: Was crucial to Sun Microsystems development as a company. CV was Sun's first large customer for Unix -based workstations. The CDS3000 series of workstations were actually Sun-2 systems with additional graphics hardware from CV. Ultimately in 1987, CV migrated from the CGP systems to Sun-3 -based workstations known as CADDStations with a VME bus version of the GPU. Computervision merged with Prime Computer in 1988 and acquired GE Calma (its major competitor in

Computervision - Misplaced Pages Continue

1184-495: Was divided into the two main divisions: Prime Hardware, which was responsible for the proprietary computer hardware, and Prime Computervision, which was responsible for the CAD/CAM business with MEDUSA and CADDS. With falling hardware sales Prime eventually stopped production of PRIMOS computers and transferred its maintenance obligations to another company, thus being able to concentrate on the CAD/CAM software business. The company

1221-573: Was introduced in the late 1970s on the CGP80 and CGP100 using Tektronix storage tube vector devices as display terminals and graphics tablets with menus for operator input. CADDS3 was written in Fortran and based on software developed by Patrick Hanratty and acquired from S Corporation around 1973. In 1975, Computervision introduced an improved database that allowed additional entities and data types to be introduced easily. Other improvements, including

1258-554: Was renamed from Prime Computervision to Computervision (CV). Computervision created a GPU, Graphics Processing Unit, in 1980. It could traverse and render hierarchical display lists. It also produced a DCU, Display Control Unit, in 1983 with a large color raster display and attached rendering engine for basic UI operations. In 1985, CV introduced an IBM 4361-based mainframe known as the CDS5000 to support Product Data Manager (PDM). This system never ran any graphics software but instead

1295-486: Was uninterested in minicomputers, so they left and founded Prime, "taking" the code with them. They developed hardware optimized to run FORTRAN, including machine instructions that directly implemented FORTRAN's distinctive 3-way branch operation . Since Prime's hardware did not perform byte addressing , there was no impetus to create a C compiler . Late models of the hardware were eventually modified to support I-mode , and programs compiled in C. Later, at version 16,

1332-500: Was used to manage the large number of product files and data that users were generating. The CDS5000 was networked with CDS4000 and CGP200X systems using serial links. PDM was later made platform independent and was offered on the original IBM platform, as well as DEC/VMS and Sun/Unix - opening up its CADDS workstations to run in conjunction with this range of host platforms for product data vaulting, access/security, revision control, backup/recovery, archive/restore features. Computervision

1369-622: Was with the CADDS4X on the CGP200X running CGOS200X. This version of the operating system and hardware improved memory management (not true virtual memory) and increased program size. In 1984 a cluster of CGP200X with a proprietary 32-bit processor Analytic Processing Unit (APU) was offered as the Computervision Distributed System (CDS) 4000. The APU was sometimes called "All Paws Up". CADDS production continued into

#759240