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ways more optimistic than the actual costs and schedules when the projects were
completed.)
Price is now one of a number of companies that design and build parametric
estimation tools. All of these companies are roughly the same size and all are in-
dependent, even though several started within large corporations.
Parametric estimation companies have also been subject to a curious reversal of
startup sequencing. Many software companies started as small independent com-
panies that were later acquired by major corporations. Parametric estimation, on
the other hand, tended to start in major corporations such as IBM, RCA, and TRW
and were then spun off into independent companies later.
Prime Computers (Pr1me)
Prime Computers was in the sector of building minicomputers. It was founded in
1972 in Natick, Massachusetts, by a team of several entrepreneurs, some of whom
had worked on the MIT Multics project. The first Prime computers were patterned
after Honeywell computers and are sometimes called clones.
Note
While “Prime” is spelled using the letter “i,” the company's logo
uses the numeral “1.” This is an awkward situation for discussing
the company, so “Prime” with all alphabetic characters is used in
this topic.
William Poduska was the Vice President of Software and became an important
figure in the history of software engineering. Poduska eventually left Prime and
founded Apollo Computers.
Prime was one of the companies that achieved success with vertical marketing:
banking was the industry chosen by Prime, and it did well. By the mid-1980s,
many banks were using Prime hardware and the Prime database. Prime peaked
during the late 1980s when its equipment was used by over 330 Fortune 500 com-
panies.
Prime also tried to diversify and had several interesting computer-aided design
(CAD) products. In later years, Prime fell behind in processing speed and tech-
nology. For example, unlike high-end IBM equipment, Prime computers could be
exported to Russia and the Soviet countries because the U.S. government did not
consider them to have any technologies that might be stolen.
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