MASSCOMP
Encyclopedia
Massachusetts Computer Corporation was a computer manufacturer based in Westford, Massachusetts. Originally conceived by C Forbes Dewey of MIT and inventor Chester Schuler it was founded formally in 1981. Its target market was realtime computing, with a focus on high-speed data acquisition. Its major innovation was that it created the first widely available computer product which was able to sample analog signals at one million samples per second and store the resulting data to disk continuously. Given the technology available at the time—Motorola 68000 series CPUs of only a few megahertz in speed and slow disk drives—this product represented quite a technological achievement. The company's products incorporated a variant of the UNIX
operating system, known as RTU (Real Time Unix) which had been tuned and extended to allow realtime operation.
For a small company, it incorporated a number of ambitious and innovative projects in addition to RTU, including their own C
and FORTRAN
compiler, a block diagram language known as "Laboratory Workbench" that allowed visual programming of real time systems to connect real-time analog inputs and outputs to signal processing operations and interactive virtual instruments for data display, and their own high level graphics subsystem.
MASSCOMP, as the company was popularly known, grew to about $65 million in sales per year and ultimately purchased Concurrent Computer Corporation
in 1988 in a "junk bond deal" and assumed the Concurrent name. The successor company later moved its headquarters to Atlanta, Georgia.
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
operating system, known as RTU (Real Time Unix) which had been tuned and extended to allow realtime operation.
For a small company, it incorporated a number of ambitious and innovative projects in addition to RTU, including their own C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
and FORTRAN
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
compiler, a block diagram language known as "Laboratory Workbench" that allowed visual programming of real time systems to connect real-time analog inputs and outputs to signal processing operations and interactive virtual instruments for data display, and their own high level graphics subsystem.
MASSCOMP, as the company was popularly known, grew to about $65 million in sales per year and ultimately purchased Concurrent Computer Corporation
Concurrent Computer Corporation
Concurrent Computer Corporation is a developer and provider of Video on demand systems to Multiple Service Organizations. Concurrent's On-Demand technology is based on off-the-shelf hardware and customized open-source software including RedHawk Linux, a customized version of Red Hat Enterprise...
in 1988 in a "junk bond deal" and assumed the Concurrent name. The successor company later moved its headquarters to Atlanta, Georgia.