MASSCOMP

Massachusetts Computer Corporation was founded in 1981 in Westford, Massachusetts by C Forbes Dewey of MIT and Chester Schuler. The company targeted high-speed data acquisition in the real-time computing market. It created one of the first computer systems that could perform more than one million analog samples per second and continuously save the data to disk. For a Motorola 68000 CPU based system and with the disk drives that were available at the time this was quite an achievement. The systems ran variant of the UNIX operating system known as RTU (Real Time Unix), RTU was optimized and enhanced for real-time data acquisition. In addition to RTU, MASSCOMP offered their own C and FORTRAN compilers. Their "Laboratory Workbench" block diagram language supported visual programming for real time systems. This supported real-time analog inputs and outputs to signal processing subsystems and interactive virtual instruments for data display using their own high level graphics subsystem.

MASSCOMP eventially grew to about $65 million in annual sales and in 1988 merged into Concurrent Computer Corporation and eventually moved its headquarters to Atlanta, Georgia.