Prime Computer, Inc. was a Natick, Massachusetts

Natick, Massachusetts

Natick is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. Natick is located near the center of the MetroWest region of Massachusetts, with a population of 33,006 at the 2010 census. Only west from Boston, Natick is considered part of the Greater Boston area...

-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. The alternative spellings "PR1ME" and "PR1ME Computer" were used as brand names or logo

Logo

A logo is a graphic mark or emblem commonly used by commercial enterprises, organizations and even individuals to aid and promote instant public recognition...

s by the company.
The company was started by 7 founders, some of whom worked on the Multics

Multics

Multics was an influential early time-sharing operating system. The project was started in 1964 in Cambridge, Massachusetts...

 project at MIT.

• Robert Baron (President)
• Sidney Halligan (VP Sales)
• James Campbell (Director of Marketing)
• Joseph Cashen (VP Hardware Engineering)
• Robert Berkowitz (VP Manufacturing)
• William Poduska
  William Poduska
  Dr. John William Poduska, Sr was a founder of Prime Computer, Apollo Computer, and Stellar Computer. Prior to that he headed the Electronics Research Lab at NASA's Cambridge, Massachusetts facility and also worked at Honeywell....
  
   (VP Software Engineering)
• John Carter (Director of Human Resources)

The company started with the motto "Software First".

Poduska left in 1981 to start Apollo Computer

Apollo Computer

Apollo Computer, Inc., founded 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts by William Poduska and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo was one of the first vendors of graphical workstations in the 1980s...

.
The original products were clones of the Honeywell 316

Honeywell 316

The Honeywell 316 was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by Honeywell starting in 1969. It is part of the Series 16 which includes the Models 116, 316, 416, 516 and 716. They were commonly used for data acquisition and control, remote message concentration, clinical laboratory systems and...

 and 516 minicomputers.

• 1972: Prime 200

The first Prime system, similar to the DDP 516 but a 32-bit machine with paging.