PR1ME Computer 9650

Prime Computer, Inc. was founded in Natick, Massachusetts 1972 by Robert Baron (President), Sidney Halligan (VP Sales), James Campbell (Director of Marketing), Joseph Cashen (VP Hardware Engineering), Robert Berkowitz (VP Manufacturing), William Poduska (VP Software Engineering) and John Carter (Director of Human Resources). The company originally produced clones of Honeywell 316 systems, and eventually went on to produce high performance systems that competed with the DEC VAX-11/780. By the late 1980s the performance of their systems could not compete with other systems. They closed their manufacturing and design departments and became Computervision. In 1998 Computervision was bought by Parametric Technology Corporation who is still in business today.

In July 1984 Prime introduced the Model 9650.

Technical Data:

Upper CPU Board, P/N 6282-901

Front View. The CPU cabinet is on the left. The storage cabinet holding Century Data Systems 315mb drives is on the right.

Lower CPU Board, P/N 6281-901

Front View of the CPU cabinet with the door open.

Upper Two Memory Boards, P/N 12512-E8

Middle Two Memory Boards, P/N 7615-902

Rear View of the CPU cabinet with the door open.

Click on the image for a larger view.

Lower Two Memory Boards, P/N 230-010-904

I/O Boards

2034-901, ICS2 - Intelligent Communication Subsystem 2 serial line controller. The ICS2 connects to a small card rack that contains the LAC boards, each of which can support four serial lines. This particular board (-901) is set to device address '10 and contains 64kwords of RAM (as configured at the factory).

TLA10019-0012, IDC3 Intelligent Disk Controller (4 SMD drives)

2382-004, SCSI Tape Controller

4005-901, Old style SMD disk controller (4 SMD drives)

2384-004, PNC-II - PrimeNet Node Controller. A ring based network, up to 128 nodes.

2301-901, 9 track (Cipher) tape controller

In a box

6105-402, Cartridge Tape Controller