#PRIM COMPUTERS SOFTWARE#

In 1984 there was a fork in MEDUSA as Prime took its option to keep developing MEDUSA. At the time, MEDUSA was available on the then newly released 32-bit so-called super mini computers, whose most prominent distributors were Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) (with their VAX hardware) and Prime Computer.

CIS had a partnership with Prime Computer which maintained its option on the MEDUSA source code. Computervision was interested in obtaining some of the state-of-the-art technology of the MEDUSA CAD system the Cambridge company had developed. In 1983 Computervision purchased Cambridge Interactive Systems (CIS), founded by British computer scientist Dr. As of 2019, CADDS (now at version CADDS5) was offered as a CAD/CAM system specialized for shipbuilding. The APU was sometimes called 'All Paws Up'.ĬADDS production continued into the twenty-first century. In 1984 a cluster of CGP200X with a proprietary 32-bit processor Analytic Processing Unit (APU) was offered as the Computervision Distributed System (CDS) 4000. This version of the operating system and hardware improved memory management (not true virtual memory) and increased program size. The major breakthrough in 3-D Design was with the CADDS4X on the CGP200X running CGOS200X. During this period, they also contributed to the development of the IGES standard for CAD/CAM data exchange, along with Applicon and other competitors. With CADDS4, tailored packages were available for CAD drafting, CAM ( computer-aided manufacturing), 3-D modeling, piping and plant design, printed circuit board layout, instrument panel design, and many other applications. This version of CADDS moved display technology from storage tube base displays to raster graphics and introduced the dedicated graphics co-processor board known as the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Improved 3-D design was added in the early 1980s with the CADDS4 product on the CGP200. Other improvements, including a B-spline package and improved refresh performance led to adoption by many large customers, including Boeing, which purchased dozens of systems for the 757/767 aircraft program. In 1975, Computervision introduced an improved database that allowed additional entities and data types to be introduced easily.

#PRIM COMPUTERS SOFTWARE#

CADDS3 was written in Fortran and based on software developed by Patrick Hanratty and acquired from S 3 Corporation around 1973. CADDS-2/VLSI ran on Computervision's own hardware/software which was a modified Data General Nova with a modified version of DG's RDOS operating system.ĬADDS3 was introduced in the late 1970s on the CGP80 and CGP100 using Tektronix storage tube vector devices as display terminals and graphics tablets with menus for operator input. The original CADDS-2 ran on Data General Nova 1200 computers. CADDS-2/VLSI included a new operating system, a 32-bit database, and user expandability through a dedicated programming language called ICPL (integrated circuit programming language), which was a dialect of BASIC, based on an interpreter licensed from Fairchild Semiconductor. When this proved insufficient resolution for VLSI (very large scale integration), the company developed CADDS-2/VLSI in the late 1970s. Integrated circuit layout was added with the CADDS-2 product, which had a dedicated operating system and a 16-bit graphic database. The CADDS-1 system featured a combination digitizer and plotter mounted on a large drafting table. CADDS stood for Computervison Automated Design and Drafting System. CADDS3 system being used to create a piping and instrumentation diagram in a training lab, circa 1979.Ĭomputervision's first product, CADDS-1, was aimed at the printed circuit board layout and 2-D drafting markets.

Prim computers