How did Prime start?
Prime was started on February 4th, 1972 by seven founders: Robert Baron (President) Sidney Halligan (VP Sales) James Campbell (Director of Marketing) Joseph Cashen (VP Hardware Engineering) Robert Burkeweitz (VP Manufacturing) William Poduska (VP Software Engineering) John Carter (Director of Human Resources) The company started with the motto “Software First”. David Udin (a part-time employee while in graduate school) and Joe Brownstein were the first programmers hired. Bill Poduska’s ideas about what to put into the computers they were designing (paging hardware, heavy use of microcoding) more or less determined the technical direction of the company and enabled its success (while it was successful). Otherwise Prime would have been just another minicomputer company and folded a lot earlier than it did. Prime produced a machine called the Prime 200 which was compatible with the Honeywell 316 and 516 range which had just been dropped but for which there was still a demand. Later on the
