What is/happened to Primix?
Primix is an application program which ran under Primos releases 19.4 and above. It gives the user a “Unix-like” front-end to Primos. Its main problem was that one user under Primix placed the same load on the system as twenty normal users. The other problem was that the program itself was completely pointless. Why emulate a front-end widely regarded as the most unfriendly ever devised? If you wanted to run Unix apps, just buy a Unix workstation. However Prime were desperately trying to hang on to their (proprietary) market share, and wanted to give people a way to run their Unix apps on a Prime platform. What they didn’t realise, or ignored, was that people weren’t moving to workstations because they liked Unix or Unix apps, but because the proprietary manufacturers – Prime, DEC, Bull, Sperry, DG, Honeywell, NCR, etc., were skinning them alive financially. The real problem with Primix was that it almost never had adequate staffing. The original product (1.0) was a triple threat: it wa
